Show HN: Vask – Pusher-compatible WebSockets on Cloudflare, no fan-out fees
vask.devHowdy HN, Ashley here.
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:
Really love this approach. And I’m all in for making websockets cheaper and less painful.
Using Cloudflare here has been an interesting learning curve, coming from Laravel and go
And still not 100% sure if the sharding is the correct approach, but load-testing is promising so far