Push notifications

Snout Push sends notifications to iPhone, iPad and Mac apps (through Apple's APNs), to Android apps (through Firebase Cloud Messaging), and to browsers (Web Push), from one API at https://<ref>.api.snoutdata.com/push/v1 and from SQL.

It runs inside your project, beside your database, and keeps everything there:

• The devices, the queue and the log of every delivery are tables in the push schema of your database. You read them with SQL like any other table of yours.
• Your keys are rows in your database too: your Apple key, your Firebase service account and your Web Push keys. SnoutData's own systems never store them.
• Your row-level security decides who may notify whom. Sending is an insert into push.messages, run as the caller, so an ordinary Postgres policy is the whole of the access control. With no policy, only your server (the service_role key) can send.

How it fits together

1. You switch push on for a project, and give it the keys for the platforms you ship: nothing for browsers, an Apple key for iPhone, a Firebase service account for Android.
2. Each installation of your app registers a device: the token the platform gave it, for the user who is signed in. That is a row in push.devices.
3. You send from SQL (push.send), from your server, or, where your policies allow, from your users. That is a row in push.messages, aimed at users, a topic, or devices.
4. Snout Push delivers it to Apple, Google or the browser's push service, one row in push.deliveries per device, with the provider's own answer.

Set it up

Follow the pages in this order. The browser is the quickest and needs no account anywhere, so it is a good first check that your project sends.

Page	What it covers	You need	About
Switch it on	turning push on, where the keys live, a first test send	a project	5 minutes
Browsers	Web Push in Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari	nothing more	10 minutes
iPhone, iPad and Mac	an APNs key, your App ID, the app code	a paid Apple Developer account, a Mac with Xcode	20 minutes
Android	a Firebase project, its service account, the app code	a Google account, Android Studio	30 minutes

Then, for everything after the first notification:

• Devices: registering, signing out, shared phones, visitors who never sign in.
• Sending: from SQL, a server or the client library; targets, topics, and letting your users send.
• What happened to a notification: the delivery log, and received and opened receipts from your app.
• Troubleshooting: every error each platform gives, and what to do.

Plans

	Free	Plus, Pro and Business
Push to iPhone, Android and the web	yes	yes
Send from SQL and from the API	yes	yes
A send at a later time (send_at in the future)	refused, with a sentence saying why	yes
Retries after a provider's error	a few, within about five minutes	on the provider's own schedule, for as long as it asks
A cap on how many notifications you send	none	none

There is no per-notification price and no quota. How fast a project sends follows the size of its database's plan: a bigger plan sends more notifications at once.

Limits, and what is not built

• A later send is paid. On the free plan your database pauses when it is idle, and a paused project has nothing to send at a time you chose. A future send_at is refused with a sentence about the plan (the API answers with it; a row inserted from SQL is marked refused with it), never silently held.
• The first notification after a pause waits for the wake, about a second when the project was paused recently and 10 to 20 seconds when it was paused long ago. Sending does not keep a project awake.
• A deleted user's devices go with them only when Authentication is on. When auth is switched on after push, this starts within the hour.
• Android always needs your own Firebase project. Google delivers to Android apps only through FCM, with the credentials of the project the app is built against. Browsers and Apple devices need no Firebase at all.
• Not built yet: UnifiedPush, Expo's push tokens, Live Activities, and push in the MCP server's set_product (use snoutdata products enable push).