Pusher Channels

API

Hosted WebSocket pub/sub for live updates, presence and chat features

Price: Free sandbox, then monthly plans
Access: App key and secret

About

Hosted realtime messaging: servers trigger events through an HTTP API or server SDKs, and browsers and phones receive them over WebSockets on public, private, encrypted and presence channels. Messages pass through and are not stored. The free Sandbox plan allows 200,000 messages a day.

What you can do with it

Push live dashboard, score or location updates to browsers and phones
Show who is online in a document, game or chat with presence channels
Build chat with typing indicators and read receipts on private channels

Get started

Create a Channels app and copy its app_id, key, secret and cluster
Subscribe to a channel in the browser with pusher-js
Trigger events on that channel from a server library

Example

// Server: npm install pusher
var Pusher = require("pusher");
var pusher = new Pusher({
  appId: "APP_ID",
  key: "APP_KEY",
  secret: "APP_SECRET",
  cluster: "APP_CLUSTER",
});
pusher.trigger("my-channel", "my-event", { message: "hello world" });

// Browser: <script src="https://js.pusher.com/8.3.0/pusher.min.js"></script>
var pusher = new Pusher("APP_KEY", { cluster: "APP_CLUSTER" });
var channel = pusher.subscribe("my-channel");
channel.bind("my-event", (data) => { console.log(data); });

Details

Hosting: Hosted service
Available in: Worldwide
Official SDKs: JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Ruby, PHP, Go, Java, C#, Swift, Dart
MCP server: None
Works with: Unity