Realtime Pricing: Concurrent Connections vs MAU

Most real-time collaboration platforms charge by Monthly Active Users (MAU). On the surface it sounds simple: count unique users, multiply by a per-user rate. But in practice MAU pricing creates serious problems for product teams.

A user who opens your app once for five seconds in a month costs the same as a power user with eight-hour sessions. A marketing campaign that drives thousands of one-time visitors can blow your bill out of proportion to the value those visitors generate. And because you cannot predict how many unique users will connect, budgeting becomes guesswork.

Concurrent connections measure what actually costs money: active WebSocket connections consuming server resources. If 1,000 users have accounts but only 50 are online at the same time, you pay for 50. A brief spike from a Product Hunt launch settles back down, and so does your bill.

We use P95 measurement for concurrent connections, so brief spikes do not define your bill. And our overage pricing is transparent: $0.05 per additional connection on Starter, $0.03 on Pro. No surprises, no retroactive charges, no bill shock at the end of the month.