All accounts have hard limits described below. These hard limits scale based on your package size, so you can upgrade at any time to increase most hard limits. Ably imposes limits on accounts to prevent abuse, whether intentional or by mistake. Without limits in place, abuse of an account can adversely affect the performance and quality of service we provide to all other customers. We are committed to providing a low latency reliable service to all customers, and as such, account limits allow us to honour this commitment.
Please find detailed information on all limits here
Enterprise packages offer complete flexibility over any limits configured on an account. Please get in touch if you would like to discuss a custom package for your business.
Before you get into the details of each limit, you may be interested to:
- View all your current package and account limits
- View detailed stats for the usage of your account or app
- Find out how to calculate what package you need to avoid hitting any limits using our handy limits calculator
- Understand what emails to expect when limits are neared or reached on your account
- View any historical limits you have neared or reached in your account dashboard
All account limits:
| Free packages | Paid Self-service & Business packages | Enterprise packages | |
| Connections | |||
| Peak connections (max number of concurrent connections used within a single month) | 100 | Configurable, see our pricing page | Custom or unlimited |
| Hard limit on connections (account will block connections) | Yes, 100 | Generally you only pay for your overages. However, if you exceed your provisioned connections by more than 2.5x as a self-service customer, or 5x as a business customer, then we impose a hard limit. |
Bespoke hard limits are designed to be unreachable. |
| New connections per second | 50 | Max(50, 3.3 * Connection hard limit) | Bespoke to needs |
| Messages | |||
| Max messages per month (messages and presence published & received + history, find out more) | 3 million | Configurable, see our pricing page | Custom or unlimited |
| Max messages per hour (why are there hourly limits?) | 41,700 | Total monthly messages / 72. Read more here. | Custom or unlimited |
| Max bandwidth per month (for all messages and presence events, find out more) | 5.7GiB | Total monthly messages * 2KiB, see our pricing page(e | Custom or unlimited |
| Max bandwidth per hour | 0.08GiB | Total hourly messages * 2KiB | Custom or unlimited |
| Hard limit if message or bandwidth exceeded (account will block publishing) | Yes | Generally you only pay for your overages. However, if you exceed your provisioned messages or bandwidth by more than 2.5x for self-service, or 5x for business, then we impose a hard limit. |
Bespoke hard limits are designed to be unreachable. |
| Max message size | 16KiB | 64KiB | Custom, up to 256kb |
| Max message (publish & subscribe) rate per second (why are there per second rate limits?) |
35 per second | 6.25x burst from your pre-paid hourly quota (equivalently: hourly quota / 576) | Custom or unlimited |
| Rate & channel limits | |||
| Peak concurrent channels (max number of open & active channels used within a single month). | 100 | Configurable, see our pricing page | Custom or unlimited |
| Hard limit if channels exceeded (account will block new channels) | Yes, 100 | Generally you only pay for your overages. However, if you exceed your provisioned connections by more than 2.5x for self-service, and 5x for business, then we impose a hard limit. |
Bespoke hard limits are designed to be unreachable. |
| Max subscribers on a channel. Find out more about subscribing to channels. | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Max members present on a channel. Find out more about why presence limits exist, and what happens when a presence limit is hit. |
50 | 200 | Custom |
| Max publish rate on a realtime connection | 15 per second | 50 per second | Custom |
| Max receive rate on a realtime connection | 15 per second | 50 per second | Custom |
| Max per-channel message publish rate | 15 per second | 50 per second | Custom |
| Max number of channels per connection. Find out more about this limit and how to deal with it | 50 | 200 | Custom |
| New channels per second | 50 | Max(50, 3.3 * Channel hard limit) | Bespoke to needs |
| API requests using the REST API (excluding any token requests) max rate | 20 per second | Min 50 per second Scales up based on messages purchased |
Custom |
| API requests using the REST API (excluding any token requests) hourly limit | 4,170
|
Hourly messages / 10 (= total monthly messages / 720) | |
| Token requests max rate | 50 per second | Min 125 per second Scales up based on peak connections purchased |
Custom |
| Token requests hourly limit | 60,000 | Max(72,000, peak connections * 12) | |
| Token request max size | 128KiB | 128KiB | 128KiB |
| Reactor Queue limits Find out more about the Ably Reactor |
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| Max queue size (total number of messages stored across all of your configured queues i.e. you could have two queues with capacity for 25k or one with capacity for 50k) | 10,000 | 50,000 | Custom |
| Max queue message TTL (total time a message will exist in a queue before it's consumed) | 1 hour | 24 hours | Custom |
| Max number of queues per account | 5 | 50 | Custom |
| Max messages published into the queues from all pub/sub channels per second | 100 | 200 | Custom |
| Reactor Events and Function limits Find out more about the Ably Reactor Events |
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| Max number of WebHook messages per second | 15 | 30 | 30 |
| Max number of Function (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions etc) invocations per second | 15 | 30 | Custom |
| Max concurrently-running Azure Function or Google Cloud Function invocations (note: limit does not apply to AWS lambda as lambda events use the async 'event' invocationType, so the request duration is not an issue) | 30 | 60 | Custom |
| Reactor Firehose Find out more about the Ably Reactor Firehose |
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| Max number of messages per second | Enterprise only | Enterprise only | Unlimited |
Further reading
- View all your current package and account limits
- Find out how to calculate what package you need to avoid hitting any limits using our handy limits calculator
- If you received an email about hitting a limit, find out what this means and what you can do about it
- If you have received a rate limit error from a client, see the list of metrics and explanations for each.
- View any historical limits you have neared or reached in your account dashboard
- Find out how to upgrade your account
- Get in touch if you would like to review your account limits or need help upgrading.