Vask – Pusher-compatible WebSockets on Cloudflare, no fan-out fees

Name: Vask – Pusher-compatible WebSockets on Cloudflare, no fan-out fees
Availability: InStock
Author: ashleyhindle

by ashleyhindle·May 5, 2026·6 points·2 comments

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AI Analysis

●●●BangerBig BrainSolve My Problem

Pusher clone on Cloudflare Workers charging per broadcast instead of per connection.

Strengths

•Billing per published message saves money on high-fanout workloads.
•Drop-in replacement using existing Pusher SDKs and protocol.
•Leverages Cloudflare Durable Objects for global low-latency edges.

Weaknesses

•Missing event webhooks and encrypted channels in v1.
•Enterprise SOC2 compliance story is currently undefined.

Post Description

Howdy 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?

I made a no-signup HN demo here if you want to give it a test-drive without creating an account:

https://vask.dev/showhn