OneSignal

OneSignal operates a customer engagement and lifecycle messaging platform that lets businesses send and automate communications across mobile push notifications, web push, email, SMS/RCS, in-app messages, and iOS Live Activities from a single system. Core platform capabilities include no-code Journeys workflow automation, audience segmentation and tags, personalization, A/B testing, delivery analytics, deep linking, multi-language sends, confirmed receipt, custom outcomes, and event streams to external systems, plus integrations with third-party CRMs, analytics tools and data pipelines such as Mixpanel, Amplitude, Segment, HubSpot, Adobe Audience Manager and Snowflake.

The product is distributed largely through developer SDKs — Android, iOS, Flutter, React Native, Expo, Unity and web — alongside a REST API with official client libraries for .NET, Rust, Go, Ruby, PHP, Java and Python maintained in the company's public GitHub organization. More recently the company has positioned around "autonomous lifecycle marketing," describing an autonomy ladder from manual dashboard use to AI-run campaign operation. Announced AI components include OneSignal AI (an in-product agent that drafts copy, designs emails, analyzes message performance and builds multi-step Journeys), Brand Kit (centralized brand voice, audience and visual guardrails used by the AI) and OneSignal MCP, which exposes platform capabilities to external AI tools and agents.

Founding story

OneSignal grew out of a Y Combinator-backed mobile game studio, Hiptic Games, which went through the Summer 2011 batch. While building mobile applications, the founders found customer engagement tooling inadequate — non-personalized push notifications with no segmentation, personalization or campaign measurement, and email platforms that required uploading CSV lists — so they built the messaging product themselves and pivoted the company toward it, adopting a mission of "democratizing customer engagement."

Business model

OneSignal sells software-as-a-service on a freemium, self-service plus enterprise sales model. A free tier provides unlimited mobile push sends, 10,000 monthly email sends, basic analytics and automation, and beta access to MCP and OneSignal AI. The month-to-month Growth plan starts at $19/month plus channel-based usage fees, while annual Professional and Enterprise plans are custom-priced with volume discounting, dedicated success management, SLAs and premium integrations.

Paid plans combine a fixed platform fee with variable usage charges by channel: mobile push is billed per monthly active mobile user ($0.012 on the Growth plan) with unlimited sends, web push is billed per subscriber ($0.004 on Growth), and email and SMS are billed by send volume (email $1.50 per 1,000 sends after 20,000 free monthly sends on Growth). Professional and Enterprise tiers are sold on annual contracts with custom, volume-based pricing.

Traction

Company-reported figures cite 200,000+ apps powered, 1.5 billion monthly active users reached, 1.3 trillion messages sent per year and one in four app publishers as users. At the 2022 Series C the company reported more than 1.7 million registered marketers and developers, over a million business customers and 10-12 billion messages sent daily, with support for companies in 140 countries. Published customer results include Beach Bum Games (+250% click-through rates, +140% paid user reactivation), Bitcoin.com (+15% average daily transaction attempts, +11% completed transactions) and Betmate (+600% monthly active paying users, +625% user spending per month).

Latest developments

The company has announced an AI strategy centered on autonomous lifecycle marketing, launching OneSignal AI, Brand Kit and the OneSignal MCP (available on the ChatGPT and Cursor marketplaces and via Smithery, with a Claude marketplace listing described as coming soon), all available on the free plan. It has said a OneSignal Slack Agent and an API for creating, editing and analyzing Journeys are planned. Its website messaging and documentation now cover SMS/RCS and iOS Live Activities alongside push, email and in-app channels.