I need to implement the push notifications for one of my projects. Some of the possibilities I evaluated are:
Which one would you guys recommend and why?
NB. I know Urban Airship costs a bit, but assume that the 1 mil free notifications are enough for me.
you've kinda answered your own question really haven't you?
the positives of doing it yourself are that you get unlimited for free and probably have more control (although a push notification is a push notification is a push notification... how much control do you really need).
the positives of urban airship are that you save time/effort/resources. You don't have to maintain anything or fix any bugs.
I'm assuming if you send over a million push notifications you can probably monetise your app and thus pay for the service anyway. Remember a million is a huge amount. You can send 100 people 10,000 push notifications.
You should also consider Xtify.
Similar to Urban Airship, Xtify will save you time/effort/resources but should you choose to expand to other platforms beyond iPhone such as Android and Blackberry etc. which don't have native push support you can use one API's handle all of your notifications.
Xtify also includes tools to allow you to easily leverage things like location, with your notifications or independently. For example you could configure notifications to automatically be generated based on a users location.
As for price, Xtify gives you unlimited notifications for upto 250k users...
When we did our evaluation, the location data and management tools proved to be a huge differentiator for us.