Vask – Pusher-compatible WebSockets on Cloudflare, no fan-out fees
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…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
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
Does the same job
all alternatives →- AOAn open-source, self-hostable Heroku and Netlify alternative2021 · coollabs.io · ▲345
- VSVerani – Socket.io-like realtime SDK for CloudflareDec 2025 · github.com · ▲6
Hi HN, I built Verani, an experimental realtime SDK for Cloudflare Actors (Durable Objects). The goal is to bring a familiar, event-based DX (rooms, emit, channels, lifecycle hooks) to Cloudflare Durable Objects, while handling hibernation correctly. It focuses on - Socket.io-like semantics on top of Durable Objects - Proper Actor hibernation handling (WebSockets survive, state is restored) - Typed API with explicit tradeoffs. It’s early and experimental, but functional. I built it mainly to explore DX and state management patterns on Cloudflare Actors, and I’d love feedback from people…
- PAPxy – A Go server that proxies websocket livestreams to RTMP servers2020 · github.com · ▲133
- GRGoatee – Redis, WebSocket notifications in Go2014 · github.com · ▲40
Hey guys and gals! I'm learning Go at the moment and LOVING it. I was hoping to get constructive feedback on a project I'm working on - goatee - which is a notification server that utilizes Redis pub/sub and WebSockets. It's fairly bare-bones at the moment but I'm hoping to add in a lot more features as time goes on such as queueing and WebSocket channel subscriptions (via Go Socketio possibly).
More life & fun this month
the category →- TL
Life & fun · 10d ago · louisabraham.github.io
Photosynthesis fires two of your iPhone
Life & fun · 28d ago · photosynthesis.camera
SoloUno▲310Take control of hair pulling, nail biting & skin picking
Life & fun · 28d ago · solouno.io
Scroll through all 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 reachable Rubik's Cube permutations.
Life & fun · 26d ago · everycube.alen.is
Hi HN, I built Eigendrum, a web tool that solves the 2D wave equation for arbitrary shapes so you can hear what they sound like as drums. How it works: * Solves -∇²u = λu using finite element analysis (Kφ = λMφ) on a triangle mesh. * Validated to <0.1% error against closed-form solutions for circles (Bessel zeros) and rectangles. * Sound model factors in strike location, Rayleigh damping, and mallet width. * Includes Kac drums I & II to demonstrate identical sound spectra from different geometries. * No frameworks, build steps, or dependencies. Repo and tests:…
Life & fun · 27d ago · baselashraf81.github.io
Launched alongside, May 2026
the whole month →
Parallel agents, diff reviewer, and multi-model comparisons
Dev tools · May 2026 · kilo.ai
- NW
Hey HN, Henry here from Cactus. We open-sourced Needle, a 26M parameter function-calling (tool use) model. It runs at 6000 tok/s prefill and 1200 tok/s decode on consumer devices. We were always frustrated by the little effort made towards building agentic models that run on budget phones, so we conducted investigations that led to an observation: agentic experiences are built upon tool calling, and massive models are overkill for it. Tool calling is fundamentally retrieval-and-assembly (match query to tool name, extract argument values, emit JSON), not reasoning. Cross-attention…
Life & fun · May 2026 · github.com
- FM
Dev tools · May 2026 · github.com