Aggelia

Great product and idea, know first hand the pains of creating scalable real-time systems!

Hey Product Hunters! During my journey as a web developer, I noticed that building real-time/presence-based features has always been a pain for my coworkers and me. When you're a startup, you can't really afford to spend time scaling and maintaining a socket infrastructure. In my last startup, we used Firebase to handle all the real-time stuff, but at some point, it just broke. Despite the fact Firestore and RTDB are incredible products, they are not really intended to handle Presence and real-time messages. Moreover, all those products in the market are very expensive. That's the reason why we decided to create Aggelia.io Our goal is to become the #1 real-time API for startups. Today, we are looking for our first beta users. We want to get as much feedback as possible to keep improving our product! 🔥 If you're interested, you're welcome to the Aggelia Squad! 🔥

[What's the difference with Firebase / Firestore ?] Firebase (especially Firestore) is great as a real-time database. However, even if we often use it that way, it's not really intended to use it in order to emit/listen a lot of real-time events. Let’s take a consumer app where you can display your friends on the Home Screen. Every time one of your friends goes online, you wanna see his « presence status » changing with a green bubble. It's a very simple problem you could solve with Firestore. However, let’s say you have 100 friends, and all of them have 100 friends. Now you must dispatch thousands of events if you want real-time updates. You also may be want to get the list of your "online" friends to start a video call? Structuring a Firestore database around this kind of use case is impossible at scale. Moreover, writing in a database is slow and has limitations. Firestore can only afford 10K writes per second over your entire dB and 500 writes per second in the same collection in some cases. Those limits are high enough for small products, but in a lot of situations, they are not. With Aggelia, you can easily emit an event to anybody under 60ms and the number of events per second is not limited at all. You could also synchronize the presence of your users across all your databases using efficient and reliable webhooks.