specification: API Commons Rate Limits
specificationVersion: '0.1'
schema: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/interface-research/main/schema/api-commons.yml#/$defs/RateLimits
provider: Pusher
providerId: pusher
created: '2026-05-08'
# Provenance stamped 2026-08-11: this artifact was written by the API Evangelist
# bulk sweep dated 2026-05-08, not harvested from the provider. See roadmap#35.
method: generated
modified: '2026-05-08'
reconciled: true
tags:
  - Realtime
  - Rate Limiting
description: >-
  Pusher Channels gates per-app concurrent connections and daily message volume by plan tier
  (100 connections / 200K msg/day on Sandbox up to 30K / 90M on Growth Plus). Server-side HTTP
  publish endpoints additionally enforce a per-channel-per-second message cap. Beams enforces
  per-publish payload size and per-instance throughput caps. HTTP 429 is returned when caps are
  exceeded.
sources:
  - https://pusher.com/docs/channels
  - https://pusher.com/channels/pricing
responseCodes:
  throttled: 429
limits:
  - name: Sandbox connections
    scope: app
    metric: concurrent_connections
    limit: 100
  - name: Sandbox messages
    scope: app
    metric: messages_per_day
    limit: 200000
  - name: Pro connections
    scope: app
    metric: concurrent_connections
    limit: 2000
  - name: Pro messages
    scope: app
    metric: messages_per_day
    limit: 4000000
  - name: Business connections
    scope: app
    metric: concurrent_connections
    limit: 5000
  - name: Business messages
    scope: app
    metric: messages_per_day
    limit: 10000000
  - name: Growth Plus connections
    scope: app
    metric: concurrent_connections
    limit: 30000
  - name: Growth Plus messages
    scope: app
    metric: messages_per_day
    limit: 90000000
  - name: Enterprise
    scope: app
    metric: concurrent_connections
    limit: -1
    notes: Sales-led contract.
policies:
  - name: Backoff Strategy
    description: Honor 429 Retry-After and apply exponential backoff with jitter.
  - name: Per-channel publish
    description: Avoid publishing more than ~10 events/sec to a single channel; shard across channels.
maintainers:
  - FN: Kin Lane
    email: kin@apievangelist.com