Frequently Asked Questions

How does VPush count messages?

A message is a single request sent to our websocket API. Messages are counted the same regardless of how many subscribers they reach. For example, a single message sent to 10 subscribers is counted the same way as a single message sent to 100,000 subscribers.

What is the maximum size of a message?

The maximum size of a single message our websocket endpoint can handle is 1,048 KB. We do not charge more for larger messages, a message is a message regardless of it's size, so don't worry about sending larger payloads through our API.

What is a context?

A context is a defined namespace that messages are stored and organized into (you can think of them like individual channels). Every subscriber that is subscribed to a context will recieve all of the messages sent to that context. You can use multiple contexts to segregate messages to different subscriber groups. Messages are counted per account, meaning it doesn't matter if you send 100 messages through 1 context or 25 messages through 4 contexts, your account will be charged 100 messages in both cases.

What is message archiving?

VPush will archive each message sent and allow you to search through the message archive and back it up locally. This is useful if you plan to use VPush as an error reporting service or if you don't want to write the infrastructure to store messages yourself. Lower tiers do not have message archiving (messages are sent and instantly consumed by all the consumers connected to that context).

What are the limitations on the free tier?

As stated above, the free tier can have 1 context, can send 300k messages a month and can have up to 300 concurrent connections. The free tier is also unable to be used by commercial projects. The free tier is meant for individual developers for their projects and for getting familiar with VPush's API. If you need the ability to use VPush for commercial purposes, please upgrade to one of the higher tiers.

What is VPush's availability?

For enterprise & scale customers we ensure a 99.99% (4 nines) availability at all times. For lower tiers we do not ensure any uptime availability but we do provide at least 95% uptime historically. If you need guaranteed uptime availability, please update to the enterprise or scale tiers.

How large can VPush scale?

Through the benchmarks we have conducted we know we can comfortably handle up to 250k concurrent connections per logical server. For our scale customers, we will reach out and work with you to get an estimate of the number of concurrent users and messages projected and will scale up our services accordingly.

What are the benefits VPush provides over other live messaging providers?

VPush offers a bigger free tier compared to our competitors along with more favourable pricing for our higher tiers on a dollar-per-message basis. Our pricing model is also more transparent in that we do not charge per message recieved but per message sent. Our competitors charge for a message based on how many consumers that message reaches, we charge based on each message sent regardless to how many consumers that message is sent to. Finally, we allow for message archival/search through our service, unlike our competitors.

What backend technologies does VPush use?

We use a custom message broker service written in rust to recieve and deliver messages. For archiving and reading messages we use PostgreSQL. Finally, our API is written in typescript utilizing Fastify as our webserver.