Your time really isn't worth $1000/hour. If everyone starts pretending it is it'd be silly to write a single line of code yourself, why would you when you're worth $7-10,000 a day?

I still do understand your point, but this is Hacker News after all, not Outsourcing News. This thread reads a little like a couple of suits just came in here to stomp on a hacker's opensource project.

I mean replace the words 'subscribed socket connections' in peterforde's original comment with 'web server' and suddenly it looks odd to be paying $19 or $50 a month for something like this in this day and age. Where would we be if there were only IIS out there to use? Or no MySQL/Postgres?

I've not used websockets in anger yet and I know it's still kinda ropey, but this is basic programming stuff, paying someone else for it is a bit, well, raise eyebrows time. SMTP is hard because of the configuration problems and dealing with a ton of arcane and opaque problems with major email providers.

This is something that's actually fun to muck around with. In the end the solution of Pusher is only marginally less complicated than the original problem.

At the moment maybe Pusher's a good solution for a fast moving business to a problem that's not well solved in the open source stack, but it's only a matter of time till there's the equivalent of apache or nginx.

And this is perhaps the first step. So kudos to daraosn for putting it out there, also seems the perfect kind of problem to be using node.js for.