Why leading companies build realtime on Ably
Every company on this page reached the same conclusion. Realtime is critical to their product, and building it themselves would drain engineering time better spent on their own roadmap. They rely on Ably instead, and ship with the time they got back.
- Tennis Australia
- HubSpot
- Genius Sports
- Intercom
- Mentimeter
- Toyota
- Dialpad
- Webflow
- OfferUp
- LightSpeed Systems
- Nascar
- Colette Health
- Duolingo
- Gorgias
CONVERSATIONAL AI
A dropped connection shouldn't cost the whole conversation
A dropped connection used to mean a delayed chat reply. In a conversational AI product, it means the user loses the response mid-answer, and the context with it. Intercom learned this at scale: they built their own session layer, Nexus, then replaced it with Ably as Fin grew.
- With Ably AI Transport, your AI responses stream over WebSockets, pick up where they left off after a disconnect, and follow users from one device to the next.
AI agent conversations, delivered without gaps
18M+ peak concurrent connections supported
Live chat, running at 3 billion messages a month
$300k saved yearly on infrastructure and engineering
“If we were building this system from scratch today, we'd start with something like Ably. It lets us focus on the product, not the plumbing.”
Colin Kennedy
Principal Product Engineer, Fin
B2B SOFTWARE
268,000 businesses rely on HubSpot. HubSpot relies on Ably.
HubSpot did the math: 20% of their engineering already went on infrastructure, and realtime would cost more to build and run than it returned. Every company here made the same call. Some, like Dialpad, ship AI features on that same foundation, but here realtime carries the whole product, not one capability.
- Add chat, notifications, presence, and live collaboration to your product without building or running the infrastructure behind them. Ably handles the scaling, backed by a 99.999% uptime SLA your own customers can count on.
20+ realtime use cases, including live AI transcription
60B+ messages a month · Zero downtime since migration
Zero to 70,000+ participants in seconds
Room to triple its connection ceiling, to 150,000
“Number one is really the SLA. It's a solid service. So far, it's been exactly what we need. No major incidents, no issues. The peace of mind has been huge.”
Arnaud Budkiewicz
VP of Engineering, Dialpad
SPORTS & MEDIA
When millions watch live, latency is the product.
Tennis Australia load-tested every major provider against one target: reach millions of fans within 500ms. Ably was the only platform that passed, in a tournament that ran to more than nine billion messages. Sportsbet, NASCAR, and Genius Sports run on the same guarantee.
- Push live scores, odds, telemetry, and chat to millions of fans at once. Delta compression keeps high-frequency feeds lean, and capacity scales up for the moments nobody can schedule, like a last-lap crash.
Live chat built into 'Bet With Mates', at 4.5 million messages a day
2M+ active customers · 65k+ bets a minute, with zero downtime over the past year
Live in-car telemetry as a second-screen fan experience
1TB+ data generated every race · 370m+ messages during the 2024 Daytona 500
Live betting data delivered 3-4 seconds ahead of video
240,000 events covered each year · 30 hours of developer time saved a month
“Our formal evaluation process and double load testing proved that Ably was the only platform that could meet our very challenging performance targets. Ably delivered without a hitch in 2018 and has effortlessly supported huge growth in demand, right up to our most recent tournament.”
Jeremy Keech
PMO Manager, Tennis Australia
Healthcare
Doxy.me feared its realtime stack. Now it's a strength.
Doxy.me's old realtime provider was failing in ways patients could feel: ghost check-in chimes, chat arriving out of sequence, outages lasting a day. Its engineers avoided what their VP of Engineering called a scary black box, and it carried 250,000 patient visits a day. Six months after moving to Ably it cost 65% less, queue issues were down 95%, and the fear was gone.
- Build patient chat, visit check-ins, and live clinical dashboards on infrastructure that's HIPAA compliant and SOC 2 Type II audited. Keep data in a single region and control how long it's stored.
250,000 virtual visits a day, rebuilt in under six months
65% lower realtime infrastructure costs · full ROI in under six months
Kafka to live dashboards for 50% of the US urgent care market
One engineer · live in three weeks
“It's the only HIPAA-compliant realtime solution capable of integrating with Kafka streams and giving us the performance guarantees we need.”
Andrew Hanisch,
System Architect, Experity
From self-build
Fin built its own realtime platform, Nexus. As Fin AI Agent grew, it moved to Ably so its engineers could build agents instead of maintaining WebSocket infrastructure.
From Pusher
TeamRetro moved in one week of core work by one developer: 30% faster sync, zero outages since.
From PubNub
Doxy.me expected the migration to take a year. It took under six months, with zero downtime, and app crashes caused by signaling issues dropped 99%.
Also building on Ably
Hundreds of companies build realtime experiences on Ably, from start-ups to global enterprises. Read how they did it.
Highly rated on G2
Ably earns top G2 reviews for its reliable realtime infrastructure, developer-friendly SDKs and customer support.
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