Well i don't know about your stack but from what you describe I can definitely suggest 2 solutions. Building a backend for a chat is easy. At my company, a medi

Well i don't know about your stack but from what you describe I can definitely suggest 2 solutions. Building a backend for a chat is easy. At my company, a medium based startup, I'm responsible for writing full stack solutions for our clients. 1. firebase real time database. This one is really easy to implement. Using firebase almost completely solves your backend needs. You will mainly need to write the frontend. It comes with easy to use library. You can use it with react, angular, vanilla javascript or any one of the other frontend frameworks. This one is really easy to implement. It basically connect your frontend with a real time publisher/subscriber to the firebase. It's also scalable so you will not need to maintain any server or scale up or down your servers. The pricing is also flexible and you only pay for usage. The downside of firebase is that it might not fit to you stack. I don't know what your stack is but you will might need to fit it to your stack. 2. This one is also easy to implement but will require you to write the backend service. ec2 + Node Js + express server + socket.io + typescript + mongodb/sql/database you already use + s3 as file storage. This one is also easy. setting up socket api on ec2 is really easy. It can easily take 20,000 connections per day with the small ec2 that cost something like $5 to $20 per month. I guess you will need to write something like 600 lines of code to set it up but if you need security + validations + types it will might be 1200 lines. if you are already using AWS it might be better. Again from my experience the t2 can easily take the load. We are currently using this stack to download over 10 million of records every hour and to sync it to our marketing dashboards. Should you buy? Well, I don't know what is the costs of buying. I never did research on buying white label chat. I also don't know how good are the chat solutions that are available on the market and I don't know if you will be able to adjust it to your needs or to provide a better experience to your users. Plus you will also need a developer to build the integration. Should you build? Definitely build. It’s easy. If you plan to build i guess you will need 1 developer for max 1 month of work (including the frontend and the backend). That is if you already have the ui/ux ready and set in place. So i guess the costs of building is something between $5000 to $15000 (frontend + backend) depending on the developer you hire. Anyway building a chat app is easy. It's not something tricky. I guess it will take you max 1 month for a finished product. I would definitely choose to build.