The Pusher Sandbox plan: building creative environments to support our users

Hey! I’m Gavin, the Marketing Assistant here at Pusher 👋

February will mark the anniversary of my first year at Pusher. Coming into the role as a rookie in tech with little-to-no developer industry experience, the last 12 months have been nothing short of a steep learning curve.

Some industry knowledge has taken a bit of time to stick. I can now tell you what a WebSocket is. I’ve wrapped my head around how Channels and Beams works, but the ever-changing world of realtime technology will always keep me on my toes. What’s come a lot more naturally is understanding our community and what matters most to them. Initially, this felt like one of my biggest challenges. I can’t write code or build fully-fledged apps. I felt it was going to be an uphill climb earning my seat at the table in conversations with the community.

Ideas & Environment

Over the past twelve months, I’ve spent a lot of time interacting directly with our users and those within the wider dev community. I’ve helped host multiple in-person Pusher Sessions meetups in our London office after an eighteen month, covid19-induced hiatus. I’ve had conversations with our users and learned how Pusher fits in their tech stack or their clever use case. I took part in my first ever hackathon. Getting to understand our community from the ground up, I quickly began to find some common ground: the importance of ideas and environment, and how the two intertwine.

Again. I regretfully can’t build an app just yet. What I can build is an iPhone from spare parts if when I drop it down a flight of stairs. Before that, it was LEGO cities in my playroom, or sketchy DIY mods to our GoKart so all my brothers could fit in at the one time. I grew up in an environment where I could share ideas, build, break, and go again.

My builds might be of a different nature. I might not yet understand how a developer’s idea works but the excitement around sharing ideas or what you’ve been building, breaking, strikes a mutual chord. It’s why I find it so refreshing to speak with developers who are bursting to share what they’ve been working on. From hobbyists playing around and building things they love, to innovators trying to get their idea off the ground, and everyone in between. This got me thinking about our free Sandbox plan and how it resembles the perfect platform for harnessing our developers’ creativity.

The sandbox plan is a free plan which gives you 200,000 messages and up to 100 concurrent connections per day to allow you to start off with a small-scale realtime build, prototype an idea or just have a bit of fun learning the platform!

Supporting creative minds

I’ve spent a lot of time speaking with colleagues who’ve been at Pusher since the early days, learning how the company’s relationship with developers has shaped over the years. I feel Pusher has always held a strong sentiment towards those at the start of their developer journey. Pusher boasts a place in the stack of many multinational corporations – a list that continues to grow. But now, I see the people behind these companies through a different lens.

The senior developers, engineers, CTOs who are making these technical decisions – what journeys have they had up to now? I’m sure once upon a time, many were hobbyist developers, playing around with new technologies or building apps for the things they love. We’ve seen Channels power an IOT smart sprinkler system and a realtime altimeter. I’ve spoken to a user who used Pusher to build a long-desired feature for his golf app, initially just for him and his friends. Our users are constantly challenging the versatility of our products with compelling use cases.

I see the Sandbox plan as Pusher’s commitment to supporting creativity, innovation or experimentation – ideas which become the next-gen of major products. A free, fully-featured platform to have fun, play around with our tech and nurture ideas; an environment for developers to build, break, and go again.

The floor is yours

The level of ingenuity from within the community continues to surprise me. I’ve learned so much from conversations with our users and the wider Pusher community. I want to help keep that momentum going into 2023. Bursting to share something cool you’ve been working on? Looking to showcase your demo to someone, or chat about your clever use case? I’m all ears.

Reach me on Pusher’s Discord channel @Gavin from Pusher!