Vask
Pusher-compatible WebSockets on Cloudflare, no fan-out fees
Get picks like this daily. Today's launch numbers, the top launches, AI and tech news, and a daily opportunity pick, straight to your inbox.
Want to reach these readers? Sponsor an issue.
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
HN · launched May 5, 2026 · 6 upvotes (top 69%) · 0 views
Niche: event streaming platforms · 38 launches, 2 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Commercial product
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 38 launches in event streaming platforms →
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 : 165 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #138 of 166 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 186 days after the earliest competitor.
- SuperEdge · github · 2026-09-29 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Ember · ph · 2026-11-10 · 103 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Verani · hn · 2025-12-12 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Pushduck · hn · 2026-04-14 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Fluxer · hn · 2026-01-02 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- OpenWorkers · hn · 2026-01-01 · 500 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- I built IncidentPulse after getting paged at 3 AM · hn · 2025-11-15 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Gopher · hn · 2026-09-02 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.41
The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.