Without going into too much detail about it your assumption is only partly true. It depends on how many API calls you make to jquery from the server, but also

Without going into too much detail about it your assumption is only partly true. It depends on how many API calls you make to jquery from the server, but also sending your realtime data in HTML actually doesnt suck (your server already renders html like this for http requests) and you also dont have to serve up any client-side assets -- the total number of KB transferred is likely to be less with nodequery even after x amount of time on the site because you keep everything but arbitrary strings of HTML on the server. You could make a 10,000 loc app, and you wouldnt even have to serve up a line of it to run it (in realtime) with a browser. EDIT: After looking through Flatiron/Plates, I'm really interested in seeing how I might be able to get them to work together.