6 free alternatives to Scaledrone

Pusher's free Sandbox plan gives you 200,000 messages per day and 100 concurrent connections, along with standard support and Functions included. That makes it a straightforward hosted realtime option if your main bottleneck is connection count or daily message volume. It also fits teams that want a familiar pub/sub workflow for chat, live updates, or mobile and web clients. The free plan does not include monitoring integrations or an annual discount, but the core messaging allowance is notably larger than Scaledrone's. If you want a simple move to a similar managed realtime service with more headroom, this is a practical switch.

• Beats Scaledrone: Higher daily message quota and more concurrent connections
• Falls short: Less generous feature parity and no monitoring integrations on free
• Who should switch: Switch here if you need a close hosted pub/sub replacement with more free capacity.

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Stream's free Build plan includes all Chat features, 1,000 monthly active users, 100 concurrent connections, community support, and no credit card requirement. It is a better fit when your realtime need is really a chat product, because the free plan is broad enough to build and test a real messaging experience rather than just a thin transport layer. The user allowance is the main draw, and it comes with the full Chat feature set on the free plan. It does fall behind Scaledrone on general-purpose pub/sub framing, but if your app is chat-first, Stream gives you more room before you have to pay.

• Beats Scaledrone: Much higher user allowance for chat-focused apps
• Falls short: Narrower fit if you want a generic realtime messaging layer
• Who should switch: Switch here if your primary use case is chat and you want a free plan centered on that workflow.

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Ably's free package gives you up to 200 concurrent connections, up to 500 messages per second, and up to 6 million messages per month, with access to any Ably product and no commitment required. It is the strongest option here when you want the most raw realtime headroom on the free tier and expect traffic to spike. The plan is still capped, and support is best-effort community and email, but the connection and throughput limits are far above Scaledrone's. If you are building something that may grow quickly and want a buffer before moving to paid usage, Ably is the most spacious free stopgap.

• Beats Scaledrone: Highest free-tier throughput and connection headroom
• Falls short: Card is required and the plan is less of a simple drop-in in practice
• Who should switch: Switch here if your main problem is free-tier scale headroom, not just basic messaging.

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Liveblocks' free plan is broader than a pure messaging service because it includes realtime infrastructure, collaboration features, pre-built components, unlimited monthly active users, unlimited comments, unlimited collaboration notifications, 1,000 custom notification events, 256 MB of realtime data storage, 512 MB of file storage, 10 projects, and 3 dashboard seats. It is the better choice when your app needs shared state, presence, comments, or collaborative workflows rather than simple pub/sub only. The free tier also includes development and production environments plus community support. It falls short on simultaneous room connections, but it gives a lot more product surface area before payment is needed.

• Beats Scaledrone: Broader collaboration feature set and more built-in free functionality
• Falls short: Less of a simple messaging transport and more opinionated to adopt
• Who should switch: Switch here if you are building collaborative product surfaces, not just realtime messaging.

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PubNub's free plan includes up to 200 MAU, 1 million transactions monthly, 1 GB of data storage for 7 days, 5 test Serverless Functions with 7-day runtime, 1 million push notifications per month, and no credit card requirement. It is a better fit if you need messaging plus persistence, notifications, or a little serverless logic in the same stack. The tradeoff is that the free plan is more fragmented than a dedicated pub/sub only tier, and the MAU cap can become the first limiting factor for user-facing apps. Still, the monthly transaction and notification allowances are much larger than Scaledrone's free usage ceiling.

• Beats Scaledrone: More free monthly transactions and added storage, push, and serverless features
• Falls short: Lower direct fit for a simple realtime pub/sub-only setup
• Who should switch: Switch here if you need messaging plus storage or notifications on the free tier.

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LeanCloud's Developer plan gives you 30K API requests per day, 30K REST API requests per day, 3 threads, 10K full-text search queries per day, 100 LiveQuery subscriptions per day, 5K LiveQuery messages per day, 1 GB of storage space, up to 500 daily active users for LeanMessage, 6 months of message history storage, 10K push notifications per day, and 20 concurrent users for LeanCloud Play games. It is the most feature-broad option in this list for builders who need backend pieces around realtime messaging, not just the messaging layer itself. The tradeoff is that its limits are spread across many services rather than one clean realtime quota. If your app needs backend and messaging together, it offers a lot of free surface area.

• Beats Scaledrone: Wider backend feature set and multiple free quotas beyond realtime messaging
• Falls short: More complex and less focused as a direct Scaledrone replacement
• Who should switch: Switch here if you want a backend platform with realtime features bundled in.

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