Most of my projects use realtime, but the jump from 'free' to 'paid' on existing platforms stressed me out, and I didn’t want to self-host soketi or sockudo.

So I built Vask, a websocket platform built on top of Cloudflare Workers, Durable Objects, KV storage, and analytics engine, so I can get sort-of infinitely scalable, low latency, and low-cost websockets.

I noticed that ‘fan-out’ is pretty cheap with Cloudflare, so Vask can bill per message sent rather than message received (no fan-out cost), which is great for certain workloads, and quite different to existing platforms.

Some limitations still right now in v1: no event webhooks yet (next month), no encrypted channels yet, and our enterprise/SOC2 story is "maybe later". Currently free for local development forever, with paid tiers for production.

Would love any and all feedback - especially from anyone running Pusher or similar at scale. What would stop you switching? What are people self-hosting nowadays?

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I made a no-signup HN demo here if you want to give it a test-drive without creating an account:

https://vask.dev/showhn