Pushbullet is amazing, hugely useful and extremely broad reaching in its uses. As the popularity increases so has their server load and this leads to a problem for the developers – do they wear costs of increasing load and hope that their continued good service entices people to pay for the Pro service or do they take more drastic measures?
Unfortunately for free users, this won’t be the case, they will be (in order to financially survive) introducing blocking on some automated push systems through Pushbullet. Not all users or source systems will be affected, but users who are inconvenienced by the changes are being encouraged by one of the founders Ryan Oldenburg.
Hi, Pushbullet team here.
You’re receiving this email because automated push activity from third-party software is going to your account. An example of this would be a piece of software that sends you regular updates via Pushbullet. We have seen a steady increase in the scripted / automated usage of Pushbullet and a few sources now account for far more push activity than humans. This unfortunately means automated pushing from this small number of sources is now responsible for a large amount of our server costs. To control these rising costs, we have decided to take steps to decrease this automated push activity.
Starting August 1st, we will begin blocking push activity from some automated senders for those without a Pro account (non-automated push activity will not be affected for anyone). The vast majority of users will not be affected. If you notice you are affected and want things back to working right away, please consider upgrading to Pushbullet Pro.
We are sorry for the inconvenience but have decided this is the correct move for us.
Best,
Ryan
Cofounder, Pushbullet
Personally I’m ok with this but its almost certain that some users will be upset by this and find alternative delivery methods (similar to when Evernote changed their pricing a short time ago) for their notifications, but for those of us who are heavily invested in the platform and don’t mind supporting developers for their hard work will drop some coin to continue the current functionality.
If you’re using Pushbullet, will you be dropping some coin to continue unaffected?
I use Join instead. Not as polished but does the same thing. The dev is of AutoRemote fame.
I love Pushbullet. Splashed out on a pro account when they restructured themselves. Use it a lot, especially for SMS to PC, automated notifications from my servers regarding downloads, updates, downtime etc. Love it.
Probably slightly on the expensive side compared with other services but hey happy to keep them going for as long as possible.