Hi - Matt's tied up atm, but I'll try and reply. (I'm also at Ably). > For the rest of us (think young startups, smaller shops) your costs may be prohibitive (

Hi - Matt's tied up atm, but I'll try and reply. (I'm also at Ably). > For the rest of us (think young startups, smaller shops) your costs may be prohibitive ( almost 6K / year) I'm afraid I don't follow that. We have a generous free tier (a lot of startups are fine just on that), and self service packages starting at $20/month. And very cheap overage pricing - $1.25 per million messages + $12.50 per 1000 peak concurrent connections, so people who aren't sure how much they're going to use (often the case with startups) can just pay what they use. I've linked to it elsewhere in the thread, but: see https://www.ably.io/pricing/self-service https://www.ably.io/pricing/self-service. I think you reached that number from the cost of the 'enterprise' package, but that's really for companies whose corporate policy requires that they have a personal account manager they can call at any time or something, or who want customised versions of things (eg versions of client libs with our name replaced by theirs connecting to a CNAME on their domain). Not really relevant for young startups. > did you see that there was a 'problem' in the space and built an MVP, or did you create this need? Re how we came to be, Matt has a blog post on that - https://blog.ably.io/the-story-of-how-ably-came-to-be-1d859f2c9a90#.cri0ppexg https://blog.ably.io/the-story-of-how-ably-came-to-be-1d859f... We weren't the first company in the space -- e.g. Pusher and Pubnub were both here before us -- but we weren't happy with the existing solutions for a bunch of reasons, see https://www.ably.io/compare https://www.ably.io/compare