Photon iMessage API pricing
A free tier, $25/mo Pro, and $250/line for the outbound-capable plan.
The tiers
Free
$0no card required
- Open-source SDKs and kits
- Can run against your own Mac and Apple ID
- Enough to build and evaluate a real integration
Catch Running on your own Mac is not the managed product — do not benchmark one and buy the other.
Pro
$25per month
- Up to 100 users
- Fast-track support
- Flat pricing, no per-message fee
Business
$250per line, per month
- Dedicated iMessage lines
- Group messaging API
- Cold outreach capability
- Mini-app support
Enterprise
Customquote
- Custom SLAs
- Lowest throttling
- Dedicated numbers you own
Costs that are not on the pricing page
- Dedicated lines and cold outreach sit on the $250 tier, not the $25 one — price the tier that matches your actual use case.
- A long-lived gRPC stream is an operational cost rather than a billed one, but it is a real one if your infrastructure is serverless.
Photon has the most developer-friendly pricing structure in the category, largely because it is the only vendor with a genuinely usable free tier. You can build a complete integration, test it against your own Mac and Apple ID, and pay nothing until you need managed lines.
The gap between $25 and $250 is the important one
Pro at $25/mo is not the plan most businesses need. Dedicated lines, group messaging and cold outreach are all on Business at $250 per line. If your use case is outbound messaging from a number you control, budget $250, not $25.
For a developer evaluating the category, this is the cheapest honest place to start — see can I test in a sandbox for what to actually check while you are there.
Where these numbers come from
Taken from Photon's published pricing page. Photon is one of the few vendors here that requires no sales conversation at any tier below Enterprise.
Best value for
Developers who want to build and test for free, then pay only when they go to production.
