We Raised the Free Tier — and Shipped Pro & Business Plans

Some pricing announcements bury the lede, so here it is up front: every number in the free tier went up, nothing went down, and there's nothing you need to do. The changes are already live on every account.

And alongside that: PushFlo now has Pro and Business plans for the apps that outgrew Starter.

The new free tier

Why the big jumps on connections and channels? Honest answer: they barely cost us anything. PushFlo runs on Cloudflare's edge, and an idle WebSocket connection under the hibernation model consumes almost no resources — the real cost driver is messages, and the message quota already meters that. Charging you scarcity prices for connections we get nearly free never sat right, so we stopped.

The channel bump has a second motive: we shipped projects last week, and 10 channels was cramped for anyone prototyping something channel-hungry — a chat app, a game, a per-user notification setup. 100 channels means your weekend experiment doesn't hit a wall on Saturday afternoon.

Starter also got a quiet bump: the publish rate doubled to 100 messages/second.

Pro and Business

Until now the answer to "what if I outgrow Starter?" was "email us." That's a bad answer for a self-serve product, so now there are two more rungs:

For context on where those connection numbers sit: 5,000 concurrent connections costs $299/month on Pusher. Business-tier scale — 25,000 connections — is territory where competitors quote $499 and up. The comparison page has the full table.

Both plans are on the pricing page now and are rolling out in the console — if the upgrade button still says "coming soon" when you look, it will be live shortly.

While we're at it: what "soft limits" actually means

We say "soft limits" a lot, and precision matters more as we grow, so here's exactly how limits work today:

Soft — your monthly message quota. If you blow through it mid-month because your launch went well, nothing breaks. Messages keep flowing, you get notified at 80%, 90%, and 100%, and we have a conversation about upgrading if it becomes the new normal. No mid-session cutoff, ever.

Enforced in real time — the protective limits. Per-second publish rates (the 20/100/300/1,000 numbers above) return a 429 if you exceed them, message size caps are checked on every publish, and channel counts are enforced at creation. These aren't quota gotchas — they're the guardrails that keep one runaway loop from degrading the platform for everyone, including you.

The full numbers live in the technical specs.

No action required

Existing accounts already have the new limits. Free tier users: your ceiling just doubled or better on every axis that isn't messages. If you've been rate-limit-shy about bursty publishes, the new per-second rates are live too.