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- Pusher pricing: What you need to know
Pusher pricing: What you need to know
Pusher is a realtime messaging and notifications platform that offers flexible pricing plans tailored to different use cases. Whether you’re building small-scale applications or scaling up to enterprise-grade projects, understanding Pusher’s pricing model is essential to managing costs effectively. Below, we break down Pusher’s pricing structure and highlight key considerations to help you determine if it’s the right fit for your needs.
How Pusher pricing works
Pusher operates on a quota-based pricing model, with costs fixed to a set limit on the number of connections, messages, and notification subscribers your application uses. Pusher Channels is dedicated to realtime messaging, and Pusher Beams to notifications - both products use the same pricing model. However, several features of their pricing model may impact cost predictability and scalability. Here’s a detailed breakdown of Pusher’s pricing features:
Pricing breakdown
Pusher's offering | Why is this important? | |
|---|---|---|
Pricing model | Quota-based | The pricing model should align with your project's real consumption and usage patterns in order to be cost-effective. If consumption peaks in a month, the pricing model should look at holistic consumption patterns instead of charging you only for the peak. |
Free plan | Partial. Only in 'sandbox', which is a free plan which gives you 200,000 messages and up to 100 concurrent connections per day for Channels, and 1,000 subscribers for Beams. | With a free plan, you can test the service’s functionality and compatibility with your project before committing to a paid plan. |
Pricing tiers | Free (sandbox): 200k messages and 100 concurrent connections per day for Channels; 1k subscribers for Beams | Find the right pricing tier for your scale. |
Per-minute pricing | ⛔ No. Pusher charges based on total consumption, including connections and messages sent. However, it lacks the granularity of per-minute billing, which may result in higher costs for applications with fluctuating traffic patterns. | Per-minute pricing ensures that you are only paying for what you use, with the most granular costs possible. |
Enterprise plan | ✅ Yes. | An enterprise plan ensures that you can support your realtime service as it scales out. |
Pusher's cost-optimization features | Why is this important? | |
|---|---|---|
Server-side batching | ⛔ No. | Server-side batching queues and sends individual messages sent at the same time in batches, which significantly optimizes message delivery costs. |
Delta compression | ⛔ No. Not available, leading to potentially higher bandwidth costs. | Delta compression on messages sends only the changes between the previous and the current messages (in updates, for example), which significantly reduces bandwidth costs. |
Key considerations for Pusher pricing: is it right for you?
While Pusher’s quota-based model makes it an attractive option for avoiding being billed on peak costs, it does come with a few downsides worth mentioning:
Free plan limitations: While Pusher offers a sandbox plan, its daily caps on messages and connections make it unsuitable for testing production-level use cases.
Cost inefficiency: Pusher’s quota-based pricing model charges based on a pre-paid package of daily connections and messages sent. While easy to bill and understand, this model may not provide the same level of cost optimization as more granular billing options, such as per-minute pricing, particularly for applications with fluctuating traffic. Overages can lead to usage fees.
Quality of service to cost: While Pusher can seem affordable, you also get what you pay for - Pusher has a history of major outages that have prompted customers to look elsewhere. It relies on Redis cluster infrastructure and single-region deployments, which means that if a region goes down, the app being hosted on that region goes down with it.
Pusher’s pricing model may suit projects with predictable or consistent resource needs for small to medium-sized businesses, or event-driven notification systems with steady traffic patterns. In these scenarios, the quota-based model can provide cost predictability and simplicity, as the total consumption of connections and messages is relatively stable.
However, for applications with highly variable traffic patterns—like live streaming platforms experiencing spikes during events or online gaming services with fluctuating player counts—the lack of granularity in Pusher’s billing may result in less flexibility and cost optimization compared to per-minute pricing models. For such use cases, where traffic can peak unpredictably, a more granular billing approach ensures that costs better align with actual usage.
Alternatives to Pusher for realtime experiences
There are lots of alternatives to Pusher for building realtime experiences, including PubNub, Firebase, and SignalR. Their strengths depend on your specific use case. Only one or two providers offer top reliability and scalability, however. If you’re looking for something that gives you more precise control over costs and provides highly fault-tolerant infrastructure, it’s worth exploring Ably.
Why consider Ably?
Ably offers some unique advantages that set it apart:
Cost control: With usage-based billing, Ably makes sure you only pay for what you use. This is especially helpful if your traffic tends to fluctuate—no surprises on your bill.
Cost optimization features: Ably’s server-side batching and message compression means that you can lower costs on data delivery, saving you even more on your usage bill.
Multi-region high availability: Ably’s global infrastructure is designed to keep things running even if there’s an issue in one region. That’s a big step up from single-region setups.
Granular control over QoS: Need messages delivered in a specific order or with a certain level of reliability? Ably’s got you covered.
Volume discounts: The more you use the platform, the lower your unit costs become, which keeps Ably affordable, even at extreme scale.
High scalability & availability: Built and battle-tested to handle millions of concurrent connections at scale.
Sign up for a free account today to explore Ably’s features, and visit our pricing page to get a sense of how affordable we can be for you.
