Apinator – A free Pusher alternative (presence, private channels, webhooks)

Hosted channels, presence and client events on a Pusher-style channel model. 500 concurrent connections and 500K messages a day, free, with no credit card.

The same primitives power chat, dashboards, live carts and multiplayer lobbies. Every feature is included on the free tier.

A private channel with a live member list. Join and leave events arrive automatically.

Members join and leave in realtime with no session store, Redis hash or cron job. Multiple tabs per user are handled.

Choose US or EU per app. Redis Pub/Sub fans each event out to every node in that region, so any client on any server receives it.

Live: us-east · eu-central· ap-southeast soon

Exponential backoff with jitter and automatic channel resubscription ship in every client SDK.

Get a POST when a channel is occupied or vacated and when a presence member joins or leaves. Each endpoint has its own signing secret, and failed deliveries are retried.

npm, pip, go get, Composer or Swift Package Manager. One dependency, no config files.

Public, private and presence channels share one API. Reconnect is built in.

await realtime.trigger({ name: 'message', channel: 'chat-room', data: JSON.stringify({ text: 'hi' }) })

SDKs WebSocket SDKs for six languages.

Open-source, MIT-licensed clients and servers with the same API shape everywhere: JavaScript, Node.js, Python, Go, PHP and Swift.

Each guide includes the channel design and working client and server code.

A Pusher-style channel model means concepts map 1:1, so migration is an SDK swap. The pricing model is where the options differ.

new Pusher('app_key', { cluster: 'mt1', forceTLS: true })

After@apinator/client

new Apinator({ appKey: 'app_key', cluster: 'eu' }).connect()

Based on each provider's published pricing model. Full breakdowns: Pusher alternative · Ably alternative · Managed vs self-hostedApinatorPusherAblySelf-hostedPrice$0, no cardFree sandbox, then $49+/moFree tier, then $29+/mo + usageServers + ops timeBilled onNothingPlan tier: connection and daily message capsMessages, connection and channel minutesInfrastructurePresence channelsIncludedIncludedIncludedBuild itRegionsEU + US, per appOne cluster per appGlobal edgeBuild itSetup timeMinutesMinutesMinutesDays to weeksSelf-hostingNo, hosted onlyNoNoYes

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No paid plan above it and no credit card. Private and presence channels, client events, multi-region and HMAC auth are all included.

Need more headroom? Open an issue and tell us what you're building.

The documentation goes deeper. Background reading: WebSockets vs SSE and how WebSockets scale.

A managed WebSocket server runs the servers, scaling and failover needed for persistent WebSocket connections, so you only write your app logic.

Yes. Apinator follows the Pusher channel model (public, private, presence and cache channels, client events, HMAC channel auth with the same signature format), so migration means swapping SDKs. It is free, with open-source SDKs and no per-message pricing.

Yes. Apinator is a free managed service maintained as a community project, with no paywalls, no upsells and no credit card requirement.

SDKs for JavaScript, Node.js, Python, Go, PHP and Swift. Framework guides cover Next.js, React, Vue, SvelteKit, Laravel, Python, Go and Swift.

Redis Pub/Sub fan-out across nodes: any node can receive a publish and deliver it to every connected client, regardless of which server they're on.

The client and server SDKs are open source and MIT-licensed. The server behind the managed service is proprietary; you use Apinator as a hosted service rather than self-hosting it.

500 concurrent connections, 500,000 messages per day, 100 channels, 500 presence members per channel, 500 client events per second, and up to 256 KB per WebSocket message (REST publish bodies up to 1 MB). Signed webhooks, with up to 10 endpoints per app, are included.

Sign-up takes about thirty seconds. Free, no credit card.