Pusher-Laravel alternatives for real-time chat

Hi everybody, I want to make an app with realtime features, basically a chat, I will be using laravel echo and pusher for realtime, checking the prices it seems a little pricey to be honest so I was wondering if there are other cheaper alternatives in the market?

Also is it possible , in the case I reach max concurrent connections of my pricing option in pusher, to fallback to alternative, or maybe plain old http requests? Thanks in advance.