Pusher Is Done. Meet Socketo — The Serverless WebSocket Alternative That Actually Makes Sense

Hey fellow web devs,

If you’ve ever built anything with real-time features — chat, live notifications, multiplayer games, presence channels, or dashboards that update instantly — you’ve probably used (and cursed) Pusher.

Don’t get me wrong, Pusher is fantastic — until your app actually starts to scale. They give you a monthly message quota that seems perfectly fine at first. But the exact moment you gain real traction, you run straight into the notorious “fan-out tax.” You aren’t just consuming quota for the single message you broadcast; you are burning through it for every single connected user who receives it. One broadcast to 10,000 users instantly eats 10,001 messages from your limit, wiping out your monthly quota in days and forcing you into expensive higher tiers.

That’s exactly why I built Socketo.

Socketo is a Pusher-compatible fully serverless WebSocket platform. An open-source community edition is also available for hosting on your own CloudFlare account. You can literally switch from Pusher with just 3 environment variables and keep using all your existing code. No SDK changes. No rewrites. Just… cheaper. Way cheaper.

Switching Takes Literally 5 Minutes

If you’re already using Pusher, just update these three lines in your configuration:

# Old Pusher
PUSHER_HOST=ws.pusher.com
PUSHER_APP_KEY=xxx
PUSHER_APP_SECRET=yyy

# New Socketo
PUSHER_HOST=wss.socketo.dev
PUSHER_APP_KEY=xxx
PUSHER_APP_SECRET=yyy

That’s literally it. Laravel, Next.js, Flutter, Python, whatever — everything just works. Private channels, presence… all still there.

And for local development? You don’t even need an account:

npx @socketo/cli

Instant mock server.

Three Ways to Use Socketo

• Local CLI — Perfect for dev. No account, no signup, just run and code. (@socketo/cli)
• Self-hosted — Run it yourself on Cloudflare Workers. Full open-source repo here: github.com/socketodev/socketo
• Fully managed — socketo.dev with dashboard, analytics, and live stats.

Why I Built This

I got tired of watching my Pusher bill climb every time an app actually took off. I wanted something that felt like Pusher but didn’t punish me for having users.

So I built Socketo on top of Cloudflare’s edge network — utilizing Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects for zero-overhead routing. It’s fast, cheap, and scales automatically without maintaining a single server.

If you’re a web dev who loves real-time features but hates surprise invoices, this one’s for you.

Ready to try it?

• 🌐 Website: socketo.dev
• 💻 GitHub: github.com/socketodev/socketo
• 🚀 Quick start CLI: [npx @socketo/cli](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@socketo/cli)

Pusher had a good run. But Socketo is what we actually needed in 2026.

See you on the other side ⚡

— @eckoln (the guy behind Socketo)