Free package (permanent free tier, no time limit) high confidence
Officially verified 2026-10-22 from ably.com/pricing and ably.com/docs/platform/pricing/limits. Free package: $0/month, no commitment, no credit card required, no time limit. Limits: 6,000,000 messages/month, 250,000 messages/hour, 500 messages/second; 200 concurrent connections, 200 concurrent channels, 200 channels per connection, 200 presence members per channel; 64 KiB max message size; 1 day history/message storage; 100 apps per account, 100 API keys, 100 rules, 100 namespaces; bandwidth caps 2,384 KiB/s, 1.2 GiB/hour, 28.6 GiB/month. Includes Google/GitHub SSO. Support: community (Discord, Stack Overflow) + best-effort email, SLO not SLA. The previously-circulated '100,000 messages/month, 2 apps' figure is stale: current official free tier is 6M messages/month and 100 apps/account. Note: no per-region cap stated; channels are active in each regional datacenter that has attached clients.
- Eligibility
- Open to anyone — no .edu email, no startup age/funding cap, no credit card, no region restriction stated on official pages. Free package is the default on sign-up.
- How to claim
- 1. Go to https://ably.com/pricing/ and click 'Start for free' (links to /sign-up) or sign up directly at ably.com. 2. Create an Ably account (no credit card requested). 3. Free package is the default; create apps/keys in the dashboard. To upgrade later: account owner -> Account menu -> Billing -> choose Standard ($29/mo) or Pro ($399/mo); upgrade takes effect immediately, first invoice issued at start of the following calendar month, package fee pro-rated from upgrade point, usage counted from first message after upgrade.
- Expiry
- Never expires and has no renewal — official docs state 'no time limit on how long you can try it for'. Monthly caps (6M messages, 250k/hour) reset each period; the package itself has no end date. Can be closed any time (permanently deletes all account data).
- Gotchas
- Free tier is not a trial: it is a permanent package, so 'trial-vs-free' confusion is minimal, but hard concurrency caps apply — exceeding 200 concurrent connections/channels or 500 msg/s triggers restriction or Ably contacting you to upgrade (not overage billing on Free). 1-day message history only. No uptime SLA, best-effort support only. 64 KiB max message size vs 256 KiB on Pro. Upgrade mid-month switches you to pay-per-minute usage ($2.50/M messages, $1.00/M connection & channel minutes, $0.25/GiB extra data) with immediate effect. Downgrade to Free only takes effect at start of the following billing cycle. Google/GitHub SSO is the only SSO on Free. No data-residency/region routing on Free.
- Source
- ably.com