[true_religion]

10,000 connections is $399/month is about the price of a dedicated server just for chat.

Depends on your application. Generally, if you have 1,000,000 concurrent users, shouldn't you be making some money or have investment to tide you over?

My app has ~3000 concurrent users, which comes out to 250,000 users per day making in the order of $XX,XXX per month.

At 1,000,000 concurrent, we'd expect to have 83 million users per day visiting the site. At that rate, we'd be making at the very least hundreds of thousands of dollars per month and could easily afford a $39,000/mo chat service.

[jongdubois]

Some apps have lower profit margins than others. Also some companies need to be able to integrate with their realtime channels on the backend (E.g. for doing custom realtime analytics, integrating with third-party services, applying transformations/filtering to messages in realtime, capturing certain messages for storing in your database, launching various realtime-based background tasks, etc... You do lose a lot of flexibility by going with a service like Pusher. Though it is well designed and very convenient.)

[mrinterweb]

"10,000 connections is $399/month is about the price of a dedicated server just for chat." So you're saying that pusher is breaking even on their service and that a custom socket server should also expect to require similar hardware in order to serve 10,000 connections? If so, I highly doubt either is the case. I've seen 50,000 sockets served on a $20/month VPS using socket.io without issue.

[jparreira]

For those who think Pusher $399 for 10k concurrent is a lot you have Realtime (http://framework.realtime.co/messaging) with $250 for 25k (including 251 million messages every month). Just saying...