API usage limit changes coming May 1st

Starting May 1, 2026, Pushover’s API sending limitations and capacity upgrades will become per-account rather than per-application.

tl;dr Unless you are sending many thousands of notifications per month, this change will not affect you.

Current limits

Currently each user can register a capped number of applications and each application is given a free quota to send 10,000 messages per month before needing to be upgraded. These free quotas reset on the 1st of each month. If an application is upgraded, that higher quota only applies to that particular application. Teams can choose one application to assign a higher 25,000 free message limit and all other team applications have a limit of 10,000.

While these free sending limits are rarely reached, we’ve heard from more users wanting to register additional applications than users who’ve hit those limits, whether to separate messages on their devices, give certain messages different icons, etc. We’ve also heard from teams that want to spread capacity upgrades across multiple applications which is not currently possible.

Removing application count limit, adding shared free-message pool

Going forward as of May 1st, users will be able to register as many applications as they need and all applications will share the user’s pool of 10,000 free messages per month. Similarly, teams will be able to register as many applications as needed and all will share the team’s free sending limit of 25,000 messages without having to choose just one.

Pooled capacity upgrades

Upgrades to an application’s sending quota made after May 1st will be applied to and shared among all applications on a user’s account. On May 1st, any stored billing information will shift to be associated with the account rather than separately for each application.

API response changes

Currently once an application’s free sending limit is reached and no auto-upgrade is in place, additional new message requests from that application receive an error response from our API until the end of the month when the limit is reset.

After May 1st, once a user’s shared pool of free messages is reached, all applications registered to that user will receive an error response when sending messages until upgraded or reset.

The X-Limit-App-* headers our API currently returns with each request will continue to be returned but the values will reflect the shared usage on the account/team rather than the individual application. Per-application usage graphs will still be available through the dashboard on our website, with a new graph becoming available for the user-level pooled usage.

Summary

If you only receive Pushover notifications and don’t send any from your own scripts or servers, this change will not affect you at all. Services like IFTTT, Zapier, and our e-mail gateway are not affected by these usage changes.

For those with API applications registered, you will be able to register a higher number of them after May 1st. Though unless your sending usage each month is very high, these changes will likely not affect you either.

If you have any questions about this upcoming change, please contact us.