How is this news? Chat has been around for a long time and Pusher is nothing more than a cash grab for lazy developers. You can easily get better performance, scalability, and customizability, for much cheaper with socket.io and and a caching and/or messaging service (Redis, *MQ).
Lazy is smart. Allows you to focus on adding value. Not needing better performance, scalability and customizability is not only reasonable: it's highly probable. Building and maintaining is not cheap
Is it "mid-brow dismissal"? I'll submit to your criticism of my tone, but I believe a strong argument lies behind it. Its not that I mean to discredit what Secret has accomplished, only that people shouldn't be wooed into thinking Pusher is the way to accomplish it. Its a waste of money in my opinion, and the DIY alternatives will, I assume, prove to be much better options in the long run.
>>I'll submit to your criticism of my tone, but I believe a strong argument lies behind it.
The gist of your argument is that Pusher is "nothing more than a cash grab for lazy developers," which insults not just the creators of the service but also people who use it.
Just because DIY alternatives exist for something does not mean that thing should not be used, or that people who use it are "lazy."
Well, its not exactly "DIY" if you consider that many years of work have been put into building the libraries and software that solve these problems.
I personally find it ridiculous to pay for a service like Pusher, when I know that I can accomplish the same goals with FOSS without much extra effort. For the record, I feel the same way about Heroku, so take my opinion for what its worth... I don't intend to hide my bias.
I believe people should understand and take responsibility for their systems (when possible) instead of just defaulting to relying on proprietary, closed services and software.
Will Pusher still be supported in 5 years? Will it still be affordable? Will it remain stable? Will the number of connections I'm allowed on my current plan stay the same? These are questions I don't have to ask.
I admit my assertion that Pusher is "...nothing more than a cash grab..." is a little hyperbolic, and I mean no disrespect to the people who created and maintain it, but in some way it is true. Pusher is a business that relies on its users not having the time or know how to implement the service it provides on their own.
Max 20 connections... Want 21? pay $20/month...
I can copy and paste the example chat from socket.io and push it to a VPS and instantly do way better for much less.
> a business that relies on its users not having the time or know how to implement the service it provides on their own.
By that rationale, pretty much every business on the planet that provides a service is nothing more than a cynical cash grab. Maybe you need to grow up a bit.
Of course this is how business operates... but consider the fact that you could pay someone to build you an intricate watch, and that you could also pay someone to brush your teeth for you because its a little easier than doing it yourself.
I respect Pusher and what they do to make money. There is a market, and Pusher is there to fulfill its needs. I cannot take issue with that. All I'm saying is that there are better options.
Anyways, I see a lot of tearing apart specific things I say, but not a lot of reasons why relying on Pusher is a better option than rolling your own... I welcome that sort of discussion.
I'll give the answer: because at that stage you're still trying to find product-market fit. If you can save $1k (say - and the dev time to develop a Pusher alternative probably costs more than that) in the validation stage by using an approach that will cost you 5x more in the long run - then that's a good business decision, because only 10% of the ideas that you try to validate are going to become real products.
This is a mistake that a lot of (diy-ish) people diving into entrepreneurship get wrong. Time is the most rigid resource we have and the number one asset. Just because you can build or maintain everything yourself (and developers, engineers etc. take a big pride in that - and I get it, it's an awesome feeling), doesn't always mean that you should.
