6 million messages a month, 200 concurrent connections, 200 concurrent channels and 500 messages a second across one account, with presence, one day of message history and mobile and web push. Meant for trying Ably and building a proof of concept; no card needed and no time limit.
Verified ·Oct 15, 2026
Free allowance
What the free plan includes, as the provider states it.
- messages / month
- 6M
- Counted across the account per calendar month. Every message published and every copy delivered to a subscriber counts, so one message sent to 10 subscribers is 11 messages (12 with echo, which is on by default); history reads, integration deliveries and delivered push notifications count too. A message can be at most 64 KiB.
- messages per second / second
- 500
- Messages published and received across the account each second. Each channel also accepts at most 50 published messages a second.
- messages per hour / hour
- 250K
- Messages sent across the account in a clock hour (not a rolling 60 minutes); once reached, new messages are rejected until the next hour starts.
- concurrent connections
- 200
- Realtime clients connected at the same time; REST requests and push-notification subscriptions do not count. At the limit, new connections are blocked until the count drops back under it.
- concurrent channels
- 200
- Channels active at the same time. A channel opens when a client attaches or a message is published to it, and closes once no realtime client is attached and about a minute has passed since the last detach or publish. Each channel allows 200 presence members; each connection can attach to 200 channels.
- message data / month
- 28.6 GB
- Data carried in messages: Ably states 28.6 GiB a month (shown here as 28.6 GB) and 1.2 GiB an hour. Enforced separately from the message count; once the monthly amount is used, the block lasts until the next calendar month.
- REST API requests / hour
- 25K
- HTTP API requests per clock hour, excluding token requests, at up to 50 a second. Token requests have a separate limit of 60,000 an hour.
- message history
- 1 d
- When history is enabled, messages and presence messages can be retrieved for at most 1 day.
Before you rely on it
Read with the default assumptions: a project that may grow and may make money.
- Notice: Commercial use is restricted on the free plan
The fine print
Each verdict links to the quote it rests on.
- Free for
- As long as you stay within the limits
- At the limit
- Anything over the limit is refused until the next period
- Spending cap
- None needed: the free plan cannot bill you
- Idle projects
- No pause rule documentedAbly's terms reserve the right to mark accounts that are inactive for an extended period as "inactive" and archive them. No period is given, and the clause covers all accounts, not only Free.
- Data retention
- No deletion rule documented
- Card at sign-up
- Not required
- Identity check
- An email address
- Commercial use
- RestrictedAbly presents the Free package as a way for developers to try Ably and build a proof of concept, and points production use to its paid packages. Its terms treat the free account level of service as an "Evaluation Trial", provided as is and without the SLA; they do not expressly ban commercial use.
- Mainland China
- Not verified
- Sign-up regions
- No restrictions documented
- Quotas apply per
- Account
Alternatives
Other free plans for the same need, ranked by the same neutral rules.
Changes
- New
Changed: Ably Free added to the catalog