Moving OneSignal from free to a paid plan

OneSignal's Free plan covers mobile push and in-app messages up to 1,000 MAU per organization. The policy applies to new accounts from 1 September 2026 and to existing accounts from 1 October 2026. Web push and email follow their own separate free limits: 10,000 emails a month, and up to 10,000 subscribers per web push send. So summarising the situation as "our account is going paid" leads the decision astray. Often it is one channel that has hit a limit rather than the whole account, and moving that channel onto a paid tier costs something different from moving the account wholesale. Start by separating which channel has reached which limit, and by how much. The time left before the effective date is also part of the decision. Existing accounts have a little more room, so the order can be: clean the data first, then take a quote against the number you counted. An organization opening a new account now is better off assuming the paid tier from the start when it sets up channels and structure.

Billable mobile MAU counts mobile subscription records with a session during the billing cycle. The Free plan limit uses a trailing 30-day window, so keep these periods separate. Web push counts subscribed browsers, while email counts sends. For SMS and RCS, check the relevant regional and message-type billing conditions. Services with the same member count can have different bills because active subscriptions and sends differ by channel. Estimate email volume separately from active mobile subscriptions. Current plans include in-app messaging with mobile push, while some legacy contracts bill in-app impressions separately. Match the contract's pricing model to Usage before preparing the budget. Compare each channel with the OneSignal usage and billing definitions.

Free is $0/month and covers evaluation and small starts. Growth begins at $19/month for the platform fee, with channel usage — mobile MAU, web subscribers, email volume — added on top. Professional is an annual contract on a separate quote, aimed at organizations that need advanced automation and analytics. Enterprise is an annual contract on a custom quote, with SLA, support, and security terms negotiated together. In short, up to Growth usage sets the price; above that the contract sets it. When the size is ambiguous, the thing to look at is not user count but this boundary. A service whose volume swings month to month buys the off-season along with everything else when it moves onto an annual contract. Conversely, an organization that blows past its limit every peak season is often cheaper on an annual contract. So write down both the lowest and the highest of the last twelve months: if the gap is wide, price the usage-based side first; if it is narrow and steady, price the annual contract first.

The boundary lives in two places: usage and contract terms — not in a feature list. The usage side is a matter of counting. Check whether active subscription records for mobile push and in-app messages have passed 1,000, whether monthly email volume has passed 10,000, and whether a single web push send targets more than 10,000 subscribers. The contract side is less visible. Advanced features, data retention windows, and support scope are set by the chosen plan and the individual agreement. Before the switch, check which of those the journeys and reports now running depend on, and how far back retention has to reach for last month's results to be pulled up again. It is less common for a feature used on the free tier to disappear after the switch than for a feature everyone assumed was there to be missing from the contract. The check starts from the campaigns, not the screens: take one running journey, follow it from entry condition to exit condition, note the features it leans on, and that list tells you what to ask about each plan.

MAU counts active mobile subscription records. One person using the app on two devices within the billing cycle counts as 2 MAU. Linking both subscriptions to one User with an External ID does not reduce that count. Keep identity cleanup separate from changes to billable usage. Review test environments, unnecessary duplicate subscriptions, actual sessions, and API updates to last_active. A subscription that has been inactive for a long time is not automatically part of current MAU. Deleting a previously counted subscription may not immediately change usage. Before deleting records, check whether they are needed for re-engagement, consent history, or migration. Compare actual usage again on the same billing basis after cleanup. Record active subscriptions separately from members using the official MAU definition.

Check the Free plan's 1,000 MAU limit and billing at the Organization level. An Organization groups Apps for billing and team permissions. User and messaging data belong to an App, so moving separate Apps into one Organization does not automatically merge their users, segments, or Journeys. Moving an App and migrating its data are different tasks. Choose the structure around brands, services, data-sharing boundaries, team permissions, and billing ownership. Test usage can contribute to billing when development or staging Apps belong to a paid Organization. Merely tagging a device as a test device does not exclude it from billing. Before separating environments or moving Apps, verify permissions, the applicable plan, and existing messaging settings. Use the OneSignal App and Organization structure to plan the account setup.

The instinct when reviewing a switch is to open a solution comparison table. A feature listed as supported and a campaign that is running are not the same thing. It is more accurate to list every campaign and journey actually in flight and to port each one at the grain of audience condition, trigger, channel, wait time, and exit condition. When something cannot be ported, split it out on the spot as rebuild scope. Confirm in the same table how far consent status and push subscription records can be carried across, whether there is a window during the switch week when sends stop, and what the rollback condition is. The table survives even if you choose to stay: only an organization that has written down what it actually uses gets to negotiate a lower plan. The decision narrows to three questions. Can the running campaigns move without loss? Can the send gap during the move be absorbed? Is the total cost after moving lower than the cost of staying? If any of the three is blurry, staying and adjusting the plan is the safer call.

A quote is set by three things: channel usage, the feature scope needed, and the contract term. Writing down active scale and monthly volume per channel, the number of journeys now running, and the contract term you want cuts the back-and-forth before the conversation starts. The licence cost and the build-and-operate service fee are separate, so keep them on two lines in the approval document as well. Merged into one line, next year nobody can read which of them went up. As OneSignal's Korean official partner, IXC handles plan review, Korean contracting, won-denominated payment, and tax invoicing through the same desk, and takes on subscriber migration and campaign rebuild where that is needed. The switch is not a change of payment method; it is the work of cleaning data and campaigns to set the cost structure for the next year. Pick the plan first, under deadline pressure, and the numbers you never cleaned go straight into the contract. Order it as cleanup, structure, then plan, and the same size of business comes out at a different price. The first task is to check the calendar for whether there is still time to keep that order.