PubNub · Rate Limits

Pubnub Rate Limits

PubNub does not publish per-second rate limits in the same way as competitors because billing is by MAU and transactions are unlimited within tier. Soft fair-use protections apply per publish key (typically 100 publishes per second per channel). Functions invocations are capped per second per function. Throttled responses return HTTP 429.

3 Limits Throttle: 429
RealtimeRate Limiting

Limits

Per-channel publish (soft) channel
messages_per_second
100
Soft fair-use; shard across channels for higher rates.
Functions per-instance function
invocations_per_second
100
Per-deployed-function fair-use.
MAU monthly cap account
mau_per_month
-1
Per plan tier; see plans file.

Policies

Backoff Strategy
Honor 429 Retry-After and apply exponential backoff with jitter.
Channel sharding
Use channel groups and sharded channels to scale beyond per-channel publish soft limit.

Sources