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I made an expensive mistake of building an Rails application using the Pusher service, because we wanted to work around the complexities of HTTP push. We are sending less than 500 events per day (without contents), but as we have to make the complete site HTTPS-only, we would have to go with a 50USD per month plan.

Are there any alternatives to Pusher with a more reasonable, pay-as-you go pricing model?

user2525108
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2 Answers2

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There's a whole host of self hosted realtime web technologies available including Slanger and poxa that allow Pusher's client and server libraries to be used. Slanger and Poxa are open source server implementations of the Pusher protocol. Slanger is written in Ruby and Poxa in Elixir.

Of course, Pusher removes the hassle of installation and maintenance, has a whole host of server and client libraries, massively reduces resource usage (since you're outsourcing the realtime communications layer), has a great community of users, and of course handles scaling problems

Eduardo
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jimagic
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    It's worth noting that Slanger doesn't provide HTTP fallback AFAIK, only WebSocket support. So, the Pusher JavaScript client may try to connect to HTTP endpoints which won't exist. Definitely worth testing. Also see the [realtime web tech guide](http://www.leggetter.co.uk/real-time-web-technologies-guide) for a big list of realtime web technologies (hosted/self-hosted options). – leggetter Sep 10 '13 at 09:36
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PieSocket works great and provides more free quota than Pusher.

Anand Singh
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