Alternative of cloud functions

Question

I am developing an app for elderly for my graduation project. There are 2 actors, elderly and the watcher who takes care of elderly.

'all application data stored in Firebase'

My app reminds elderly about their medication time and to check their blood pressure and glucose. Also, there is a chat between elderly and watcher.

My question is how to push notification without using cloud functions?

I have watched a Flutter course and he used Firebase Cloud Messaging and Cloud Functions, but now Cloud Functions requires to upgrade project's billing plan, so it requires money and credit card, and I don't want to spend money for my graduation project especially that I don't have a huge knowledge about flutter.

I watched a YouTube video that someone explains push notification using Laravel with Flutter, but I afraid about that because I DON'T HAVE ANY IDEA ABOUT Laravel. Also I see that there are many Flutter packages for push notification, but I don't know how to use it or if it uses a Cloud Functions or not. such as: awesome_notifications, flutter_local_notifications, pusher

I hope someone guide me to the right way.

Solution

in order to send custom notifications you can create your own server environment (backend) and from there perform all the logic to be able to send the notifications to the devices.

The only thing you need to be able to send a personalized notification from an external environment is to have the token device, in the case that you will send it to a specific person, you can also send notifications if the devices are subscribed to a topic.

This is the documentation to send notifications from a server to the device:

https://firebase.google.com/docs/cloud-messaging/http-server-ref