Push events the moment they happen.
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.
npm install @apinator/client The same primitives power chat, dashboards, live carts and multiplayer lobbies. Every feature is included on the free tier.
01 · Channels
Built-in HMAC authorization for private channels, plus cache channels that hand late subscribers the last event.
A private channel with a live member list. Join and leave events arrive automatically.
02 · Presence
Members join and leave in realtime with no session store, Redis hash or cron job. Multiple tabs per user are handled.
03 · Multi-region
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
04 · Auto-reconnect
Exponential backoff with jitter and automatic channel resubscription ship in every client SDK.
05 · Webhooks
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.
Install, subscribe, trigger. No servers to provision, no load balancers to tune, no Redis to maintain.
01 Install
npm, pip, go get, Composer or Swift Package Manager. One dependency, no config files.
$ npm install @apinator/client02 Subscribe
Public, private and presence channels share one API. Reconnect is built in.
const ch = client.connect() .subscribe('chat-room') ch.bind('message', fn)
03 Trigger
A signed server-side call. Every subscribed client receives the event.
await realtime.trigger({
name: 'message',
channel: 'chat-room',
data: JSON.stringify({ text: 'hi' }) })Open-source, MIT-licensed clients and servers with the same API shape everywhere: JavaScript, Node.js, Python, Go, PHP and Swift.
npm install @apinator/clientimport { Apinator } from '@apinator/client'
const client = new Apinator({
appKey: 'your-app-key',
cluster: 'us'
})
const channel = client.connect().subscribe('chat-room')
channel.bind('message', (data) => {
console.log('New message:', data)
})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.
Beforepusher-js
new Pusher('app_key', { cluster: 'mt1', forceTLS: true })
After@apinator/client
new Apinator({
appKey: 'app_key', cluster: 'eu'
}).connect()| Apinator | Pusher | Ably | Self-hosted | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $0, no card | Free sandbox, then $49+/mo | Free tier, then $29+/mo + usage | Servers + ops time |
| Billed on | Nothing | Plan tier: connection and daily message caps | Messages, connection and channel minutes | Infrastructure |
| Presence channels | Included | Included | Included | Build it |
| Regions | EU + US, per app | One cluster per app | Global edge | Build it |
| Setup time | Minutes | Minutes | Minutes | Days to weeks |
| Self-hosting | No, hosted only | No | No | Yes |
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.
