You've probably already run the numbers on a few chat SDKs. The free tier looked promising until you got to the fine print — a few hundred users, a handful of concurrent connections, half the features locked behind a plan you weren't ready to pay for yet. And somewhere in the terms, a line you almost skipped past: for testing and development only.
That line is the one that matters most, and it's the one most comparisons skip. Here's what we built instead: a free plan sized for an actual launch, not a proof of concept.
The Offer: Full Pro Capabilities at $0
Full Chat Pro capabilities. Free until 10,000 MAU/month. If you sign up during the current window, you get the complete Pro-tier feature set on a real production Chat App, at $0, through the end of 2027.
That's not a trimmed-down evaluation copy of the product. It's the same infrastructure, the same feature set, the same reliability commitments you'd get on a paid Pro plan — the difference is what shows up on your invoice, not what shows up in your app.
Here is what defines the offer:
Built for real product launches: Unlimited messages and full access to Direct, Group, Community, and Open Channels from day one.
Uncompromised user experience: Core polish like read receipts, typing indicators, mentions, unread badges, and multi-device sync are standard, never gated behind paid tiers.
Push notifications included: Multi-channel mobile push ships out of the box with zero add-on fees or separate contracts.
Full migration support: If you are switching from a legacy provider, end-to-end data migration is included at no extra charge.
**AI integration ready: **Pre-built Skill for Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex that generates SDK code, UI components, and backend endpoints from a single prompt.
Market Comparison: Why Free Tiers Fail at Production
The Free Tier Landscape, Side by Side
Before getting into why the number matters, here's how it stacks up against what else is out there:
Why Small Free Tiers Fail: Policy Restrictions vs. Sample Size
There are two separate reasons most free chat tiers can't carry a real product, and they don't get the same amount of attention. One is policy. The other is math — and the math is the bigger problem.
The policy problem is the one that's easy to spot. Some vendors say it outright. PubNub's own support documentation positions the free plan for testing and development, with production traffic requiring a paid upgrade. Stream's startup-facing option, the Maker Account, is gated behind an application requiring under five team members and under $10K in monthly revenue. Even if approved, its terms of service state that exceeding the plan's limits means the service "will reject all excess volume" until the next billing cycle or an upgrade. Sendbird doesn't say it as directly, but the practical effect lands in the same place: its permanent Developer plan has been independently assessed by third-party pricing analyses as workable for prototyping and internal testing, with reported account-level suspension once the MAU ceiling is crossed.
The math problem is the one most comparisons skip, and it doesn't require a policy to be real. A free tier can technically allow production traffic and still be structurally incapable of telling you anything useful about whether your product works — because the sample size itself is too small to mean anything.
Here's the concrete version of that argument:
The reason this matters more than it sounds like it should: retention curves, social graph density, and community formation are exactly the things a chat-centric product lives or dies on — and none of them are observable at a sample size of a hundred people, regardless of what the vendor's terms of service say about production use. A 100-MAU free tier that technically permits production traffic still can't answer the question a real launch needs answered, because the number of people involved is too small for the answer to mean anything. You'd need a genuinely larger sample before the data stops being noise — which is precisely the gap a 10,000-MAU free tier is sized to close, policy restrictions aside.
Put the two pillars together and the pattern is consistent either way: a free tier under roughly 1,000 MAU is built to prove an SDK works. One at 10,000 MAU, with the full feature set behind it, is sized to prove a product does.
Detailed Feature Specs & Predictable Overage Pricing
Everything Included, Laid Out in Full
No asterisks buried in a footnote. Here's what's in the plan.
Channels and messaging: Unlimited messages across Direct, Group, Community, and Open Channels. Group Channel administration — manage admins, manage members, mute members. Community Channels built to support up to 10,000 members — with sub-channel and member-group management baked in. Open Channels with no limit on how many you create, full broadcast support, and priority handling for senders and messages during high-traffic moments.
Message capabilities: Metadata, message updates, mentions, read receipts, typing indicators, broadcast and push notifications, broadcast to all open channels simultaneously, retention across Direct, Group, and Open Channels, multi-device support, and unread message counts.
Delivery infrastructure: Multi-channel push notifications included by default. A complete webhook system, so your backend can react to what's happening in a conversation without polling for it.
**Resources and data: **10,000 MAU. Peak concurrent connections at 5% of MAU. 10GB of storage. 10GB of upload capacity. 180 days of message history.
**Governance and deployment: **SSO/SAML, fine-grained permissions, and audit logs — the controls a real product needs before it can responsibly onboard real users. Multi-region deployment, private infrastructure, and disaster recovery are available as optional architecture paths as your needs grow.
If a feature is missing from this list, it's genuinely not part of the current offer — but almost everything a team needs to actually run a product, rather than just demonstrate one, already is.
Overage Pricing You Can Actually Plan Around
The other thing free plans rarely tell you upfront: what happens the moment you're successful enough to need more. Here's ours, in full, before you commit to anything:
No sales call required to find these numbers. No "contact us for enterprise pricing" standing between you and knowing what next month's bill looks like if your product actually takes off. If you grow past the included limits, you keep running — you're billed for what you used, predictably, at rates you already know today.
Who It's Built For & How to Claim
Target Use Cases & Developer Profiles
**Teams migrating from legacy providers: **If you're running on Sendbird, CometChat, Stream Chat, Ably, Twilio, or Agora and message costs, push configuration, or integration friction have become a headache, this is sized to evaluate directly. Migration support is included at no extra cost.
Startups & growing products: Choosing chat infrastructure for a social app, marketplace, livestream, or gaming product. You get enough headroom to onboard real users without a pricing barrier.
Developers running multiple experiments: Validating early proofs of concept where room to experiment matters most. 10,000 MAU with the full feature set gives you the freedom to find out whether an idea has real traction.
How to Claim & Continuity Commitment
1.Sign up and create a new Chat App in the Nexconn Console on or after September 1, 2026.
2.Integrate the Chat SDK.
3.Send at least one successful message between September 1 and December 31, 2026.
This locks in one production Chat App per eligible organization at up to 10,000 MAU, at $0, for the entire 2027 calendar year (an $860/month value on the Pro 10K tier). Only apps created on or after September 1, 2026, qualify — and only one per organization.
Post-2027 Continuity: Nexconn will publish its 2028 continuity policy by December 1, 2027 at the latest, clarifying whether the Campaign benefits, free quota, pricing, or related policies will continue, change, or end from January 1, 2028. Starter and Pro remain available as paid options — you choose the plan that fits your stage, not the one we push you into.
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