Soketi Has a Free WebSocket Server — Self-Hosted Pusher Alternative

A chat app needed real-time messaging. Pusher charges $49/month for 500 concurrent connections. Ably charges $29/month. For a side project, that kills profitability. Soketi is a free, self-hosted WebSocket server that is fully compatible with the Pusher protocol. Use existing Pusher client libraries, pay nothing. What Soketi Offers for Free Pusher Compatible - Drop-in replacement, use existing Pusher SDKs Unlimited Connections - No per-connection pricing Channels - Public, private, presence, encrypted channels Horizontal Scaling - Redis adapter for multi-server setups Webhooks - Channel events, member events Metrics - Prometheus-compatible metrics Low Latency - Written in C++ with uWebSockets.js Quick Start docker run -p 6001:6001 -p 9601:9601 quay.io/soketi/soketi:latest-16-alpine // Client - use existing Pusher library const pusher = new Pusher ( ' app-key ' , { wsHost : ' localhost ' , wsPort : 6001 , cluster : ' mt1 ' , forceTLS : false , }) const channel = pusher . subscribe ( ' c