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Pusher seems very expensive for the number of connections supported per tier.

I think the number of connections is more than enough, keep in mind that its concurrent connections. If you're using so many connections where their price seems like a sticking point you should probably roll your own.

Check out http://socket.io for the front-end libraries

It's not too hard to roll your own, I wrote my own over the course of a week in 2007 using Flash XMLSockets and Twisted Python as the backend, check here on hints if you need ideas on implementing your own: http://code.google.com/p/aonic/wiki/Examples

> Check out http://socket.io for the front-end libraries

A note of clarification: socket.io is a front-end AND back-end (node.js) package.

To be fair, "more than enough" depends on the problem being addressed. It's trivial to have tens of thousands of concurrent connections on a $20/month VPS. You get 100 concurrent connections on PusherApp for $20/month. That's a huge difference. Sure, it just works and you do no administration, etc. PusherApp seems like a convenience service for startups with money to burn.

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