Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) is Google's free messaging service for sending push notifications and data messages to Android, iOS, and web apps. It is the delivery layer most push notification tools — including Pushbrain — are built on top of, whether or not the tool advertises that fact.
FCM takes a message payload from your server and delivers it to a specific device using a registration token — a unique string generated by the FCM SDK on each device install. On iOS, FCM routes through Apple Push Notification service (APNs) under the hood once your Firebase project has an APNs key configured; on Android it delivers directly. Delivery itself is free at any volume — Google does not charge per message sent through FCM.
FCM is a delivery primitive, not a notification platform. It has no concept of a campaign, a schedule, an audience, or a dashboard. Everything around the send — storing tokens, batching sends into groups of 500 (the FCM multicast limit), pruning tokens that go stale after an uninstall, scheduling recurring sends, and giving a non-engineer a way to trigger a notification without writing code — is left for you to build.
This is the gap services like Pushbrain, OneSignal, and Novu fill, each with a different model. Pushbrain specifically uses a bring-your-own-Firebase approach: instead of re-registering devices against a new vendor's infrastructure, it connects to your existing Firebase project and adds scheduling, AI-generated copy, A/B testing, and audience health on top — delivery stays on FCM, so it stays free, and your tokens stay in your own Firebase tenant. See Pushbrain vs raw FCM for the full breakdown of what you'd build yourself versus what a strategy layer handles.
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