What does mean "100 Max Connections" in Pusher free plan

It means that you can have 100 listeners at the same time at max. Which means if a 101st user comes in, it won't see pusher notifications.

The connection count on pricing plans indicates the number of simultaneous connections allowed.

A connection is counted as a WebSocket connection to Pusher. When using the Pusher JavaScript library a new WebSocket connection is created when you create a new Pusher('APP_KEY'); instance.

Channel subscriptions are created over the existing WebSocket connection, and do not count towards your connection quota (there is no limit on the number allowed per connection).

Note: connections automatically close when a user navigates to another web page or closes their web browser so there is no need to do this manually.

@Nakov thanks! Now Im thinking how the big sites like twitter can handle thousand of users? I heard about socket.io is there any limitaion on that ? Or is it hard to develope socket.io on laravel?

@untymage

I've never done any real integration with any (yet), but if you are worried about the number of connections, you could look at this https://docs.beyondco.de/laravel-websockets/ from BeyondCode and Spatie.

@untymage yeah, they have their own system about that. No it is not, but you will have to handle everything on your own..

https://medium.com/@adnanxteam/how-to-use-laravel-with-socket-io-e7c7565cc19d

And here is a Laracasts tutorial if you are a paid subscriber:

https://laracasts.com/series/real-time-laravel-with-socket-io

If I understand this completely regarding their free plan of 100 concurrent connections. Meaning you can only have a maximum of 100 users online at the same time? wouldn't that be like a VERY VERY VERY small amount of users? even their Growth Plus could only handle 30k users online at the same time? what if you have 100k online at the same time?

OR

What the concurrent connection means is that 1 Channel whether Private/Public/Presence could have a maximum of 100 users able to join that said Channel. So what this means is that you can have unlimited users online but every Channel could only handle a maximum of 100 users able to join it.

their explanation regarding concurrent connection is very confusing.

I'm curious cause I have never used Pusher but I'm planning to use it for a small project. I'm used to using Redis and Socket.io as my driver for real-time for the past 3 years.

@skeith22 If you have more than 30K connections, you are on Enterprise plan and probably negotiate a rate. See the switch at the top of the pricing table for 'flexible pricing / Enterprise options'

I fully expect that it is 100 connections total not per channel

Don't you think that's a bit of a small amount for 30k users for$1,199/month? Well I mean for me that's very expensive in my country, their pricing is kinda targeted to the US only and not price friendly globally.

If it is out of your price range, there are free alternatives.

For instance laravel websockets (it is a drop in replacement for pusher and its free) https://beyondco.de/docs/laravel-websockets/basic-usage/pusher

@skeith22 30,000 CONCURRENT users is a lot. You are probably going to have a user base well into 6 digits and a server farm costing thousands per month, so its all relative.

Of course your mileage may vary depending on the nature of the site.

I wanted to try pusher for a change, since I've been using Redis, Socket.io, and Laravel Echo Server for 3 years already.

but I guess it's not that price friendly for me.

Yeah I know it's a lot, but I guess I think the price is too much for me because of where I live.

Probably for you guys the price is fair but for us not living in the US, that is very expensive for some of us.

With that amount of money, I could pretty much create a Redis Cluster and Echo Server Cluster to handle that amount of users but way less expensive. But I don't want to burden myself with the hassle of maintaining though.