PushCron

Overview

Mobile app teams need to send scheduled push notifications on recurring or calendar-based schedules. Existing tools like Firebase Console, OneSignal, or Braze either lack fine-grained scheduling control, charge per-message at scale, or require deep platform lock-in.

PushCron is a self-hostable SaaS web application that gives teams full control over FCM scheduling with proper retry semantics, idempotency, and multi-app support. A single docker compose up deploys the entire stack.

Campaign-Centric Model

The platform is built around a campaign-centric authoring model:

• - A campaign owns its content collection, schedules, and timezone configuration.
• - Collections hold messages and their variation matrices with round-robin or random selection strategies.
• - Timezone-aware scheduling: authored wall-clock times are applied separately per target timezone, producing distinct UTC send moments.
• - Multiple Firebase applications managed from one dashboard.

Key Features

• Flexible scheduling - daily, weekly, interval, and calendar-date schedules with multiple time slots
• Timezone targeting - deliver notifications at the right local time across all target timezones
• Message variations - content collection with round-robin or random selection for A/B-style rotation
• Guaranteed delivery - retry with exponential backoff, idempotency enforcement, zero duplicate sends
• Real-time dashboard - WebSocket-powered live updates, execution logs, last/next run visibility
• Multi-app support - manage multiple Firebase applications from a single instance
• Self-hostable - full stack deploys with a single Docker Compose command
• Observability - OpenTelemetry traces and metrics with structured logging and correlation IDs

Architecture

The system is composed of decoupled services communicating through shared PostgreSQL and Redis:

Technologies