Vask
Pusher-compatible WebSockets on Cloudflare, no fan-out fees
Details
- External ID
- 48022892
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Vask
- Website domain
- vask.dev
- Launched
- May 5, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 6
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.3053311793214863
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
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
Enrichment
- Theme
- payments, billing, and wallet infrastructure
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- websockets infrastructure for cloudflare
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial Basic WebSockets on Cloudflare Durable Objects are straightforward to scaffold, but building a production multi-tenant Pusher replacement with high fan-out scaling and exact protocol parity requires complex distributed state handling.
What it would actually take: Built on Cloudflare Workers, Durable Objects for connection state, KV for authentication, and Analytics Engine for usage metering. The hard part is managing large channel fan-outs across many distributed Durable Object instances without running into CPU/memory limits or connection dropouts. Requires expertise in edge network routing, distributed state synchronization, and WebSocket protocol emulation.
Discussion
2 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Cloudflare, Laravel
Concerns raised: Uncertainty about sharding approach correctness
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 87 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #68 of 88 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 186 days after the earliest competitor.
- Verani · hn · 2025-12-12 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Pushduck · hn · 2026-04-14 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Fluxer · hn · 2026-01-02 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- OpenWorkers · hn · 2026-01-01 · 500 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- I built IncidentPulse after getting paged at 3 AM · hn · 2025-11-15 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Lightspeed, build real time apps the Laravel way (+asteroids demo) · hn · 2026-09-20 · 17 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Gopher · hn · 2026-09-02 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Litelink · hn · 2026-09-03 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.38
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.