No Redis. No Kafka. Just Postgres. I Built Chat.

Everyone reaches for Redis and Kafka the moment they need real-time. What if you didn't have to? I'm not anti-Redis. I'm not anti-Kafka. I'm anti-"add another distributed system because we're nervous." I've watched teams ship a broker cluster before they even had a throughput problem, then spend the next year learning the operational and failure semantics of that cluster while their database sat there, underused, doing a fraction of what it was capable of. So I built a chat application that does the hard parts: multi-node real-time delivery, per-room ordering, presence, typing indicators, using Postgres as both the source of truth and the real-time message bus . No brokers. No Redis. No RabbitMQ. No separate pub/sub service. Just Postgres, NestJS, and raw WebSockets. TL;DR - Repo url here: https://github.com/adamreaksmey/chat-application-with-postgres Table of Contents The Bet: "Just Postgres" Is Enough The Core Mechanism: Triggers + LISTEN/NOTIFY as the Message Bus Schema Decision: Pe