Affordable alternatives to Pusher

There's a whole host of self hosted realtime web technologies available including Slanger and poxa that allow Pusher's client and server libraries to be used. Slanger and Poxa are open source server implementations of the Pusher protocol. Slanger is written in Ruby and Poxa in Elixir.

Of course, Pusher removes the hassle of installation and maintenance, has a whole host of server and client libraries, massively reduces resource usage (since you're outsourcing the realtime communications layer), has a great community of users, and of course handles scaling problems

PieSocket works great and provides more free quota than Pusher.