There’s no single price for wallet passes. What you pay depends on the vendor’s model (per pass, per active pass, flat fee, or bundled into a customer engagement platform) plus a few fixed costs like Apple’s $99 developer fee. The pass itself is cheap. The tools around it are where budgets grow.
If you already use Pushwoosh for push, email or SMS, wallet passes sit in the same platform, and you can compare the options side by side.
The 4 pricing models
Vendors price wallet passes in 4 main ways, and each one rewards a different kind of program.
| Model | How you pay | Works well for | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Per pass issued | A fee for each pass created | Coupons, tickets, one-time passes | Cost grows with every campaign |
| Per active pass | A fee for each pass saved on a phone, counted monthly | Loyalty and membership cards | Long-lived passes keep costing |
| Flat or tiered plan | A monthly fee for a range of passes | Predictable mid-size programs | Jumps at tier boundaries |
| Bundled in a CEP | Part of your engagement platform plan | Teams that also message by push, email, SMS | Check what the bundle includes |
Vendors can combine these models in 1 plan, for example a monthly platform fee plus volume fees. Pricing pages change, so check each vendor’s current page and note the date you checked it.
Notice the pattern: the same 10,000 passes can cost very different amounts depending on whether the vendor counts what you issue or what stays on phones.
Fixed costs every program pays
Some costs come from Apple and Google, not from your tool. You pay them whoever you pick.
- Apple Developer account: $99 a year. You need it for the Pass Type ID certificate that signs Apple passes. The certificate expires, so renewal is a recurring task, not a one-off.
- Google issuer setup. An issuer account in the Google Pay & Wallet Console, set up once per application.
- Design. Layouts, logos and hero images in the sizes each platform needs. Usually a one-time job per pass type.
- POS or scanner integration. If staff scan passes at the till or the gate, someone has to connect the barcode to your POS or ticketing system. It’s also the cost that’s easiest to leave out of a quote.
The hidden cost of a second tool
The biggest cost rarely shows up on the wallet vendor’s invoice. It comes from running wallet in a separate tool next to the platform that already knows your customers.
You end up with 2 databases. Your engagement platform holds profiles, events and segments. The pass tool holds pass holders. Keeping them in sync takes webhooks, an integration tool or developer time, and it never stays finished.
You build every journey twice. A reminder about expiring points goes from 1 tool, the pass update from another, and someone has to keep them aligned.
You also sign 2 contracts and pass 2 vendor reviews. Security, GDPR and procurement checks happen per vendor.
Some engagement platforms add wallet through a partner. Braze, for example, connects wallet tools such as PassKit through partner integrations, so you pay for both and maintain the link between them.
How to model cost at 1k, 10k and 100k holders
Vendor prices change, so build your model on formulas and plug in current rates from the pricing pages you’re comparing.
Monthly cost = platform fee + (active long-life passes × rate) + (one-time passes issued × rate) + second-tool overhead
Then run it for 3 sizes and see where each model breaks.
| Program size | What usually dominates the cost |
|---|---|
| 1,000 holders | Platform fees and setup. Per-pass fees are small. |
| 10,000 holders | Per-pass or per-active-pass fees start to matter. Compare tiers. |
| 100,000 holders | Volume fees and second-tool overhead. |
Keep long-life and one-time passes in separate lines. A coffee shop with 10,000 stamp cards and a festival issuing 10,000 tickets get very different bills under a per-active-pass model, even with the same pass count.
Be honest about the overhead line. Count the hours each month spent syncing data and rebuilding journeys in a second tool, and multiply by what that time costs. In our view this is the line that most often flips the decision.
What to ask every vendor
- Is the price per pass issued, per active pass, or flat? How exactly do you define “active”?
- What happens to cost when passes expire or customers delete them?
- Are updates and notifications included, or billed separately?
- Is API access included, and are there limits?
- Do you issue Apple and Google passes natively, or through a partner?
- Where is customer data hosted, and which certifications do you hold?
If a vendor can’t answer the first question in 1 sentence, model the bill twice.
Keep wallet in 1 platform with Pushwoosh
Pushwoosh issues native Apple and Google Wallet passes in the same platform as your push, in-app, email, SMS and WhatsApp. There’s no second database to sync and no partner in the middle. Passes share User IDs, segments and journeys with every other channel. See how it compares on the Wallet passes page.
Lower wallet costs rarely come from the lowest per-pass rate. They come from not paying twice for the same customer.
