PubNub API Limits

General API Limits

All API requests, made either by the SDK or directly through the REST interface, can be throttled if Requests Per Second (RPS) exceed 25. This limit is applicable for every PubNub API. Contact PubNub Support if you have a need for more than 25 requests per second.

Keysets

Subscribe

Account Tier	Soft Limit	Hard Limit	If hard limited is exceeded?
Free	3	3	You can't exceed the limit. Limit of 3 keysets for Free tier accounts Effective February 3, 2025, all Free tier accounts will be limited to a maximum of three keysets. If your account exceeds this limit, you must delete existing keysets to create new ones.
Starter	unlimited	unlimited	n/a
Pro	unlimited	unlimited	n/a

Publish

Function	Soft Limit (Best Practices)	Hard Limit	If hard limited is exceeded
Publish Rate	10-15 messages/sec per channel NOTE: You should be able to publish as fast as your network/hardware allows and PubNub will absorb it, but the subscriber may miss out on messages if their subscribe rate is too slow. Hence, it's a good practice not to publish more than 10-15 messages/sec per channel. A slow subscribe rate may cause messages to overflow the server side channel message queue before the subscriber can receive them. The queue only overflows if you have published over a certain number of messages during the reconnect time. This limit is configurable for your subkey and defaults to 100 messages. The queue can also overflow if the subscriber briefly disconnects from the internet.. If you have a multiplex connection, the total messages received can't exceed 100 (or your subkey configured value) over all the channels combined. For example, if it takes 230 ms to reconnect, you can only get ~400 messages per second (4 reconnects per second, each 230 ms between, 100 messages per connect). That means if you publish 500 messages per second, the subscriber will miss some of them. Also consider this isn't taking into consideration the download time for the 100 messages (up to 32 KiB * 100). Typically, reconnection is faster than that with the average reconnect time around 150 ms. If you're on AWS, your reconnection might be as low as 30-50 ms. With a 50 ms reconnection time, you can publish close to 2000 messages per second, and the subscriber won't miss messages due to overflow. The most complicated part is multiplexed subscriber connections. By default, it's 100 messages in total across all the channels, and this value is configurable for your subkey. That means you can't publish more than 100 messages in the reconnect time across channels in the multiplex channel list. This also applies to channel group and wildcard subscriptions in addition to multiplexing. Increasing the queue size for the sub-key (to 300 or 500, for example) will allow the subscribers to keep up with more messages. Also, the queue time-to-live (TTL) must be considered in addition to the queue size. Refer to the Message Buffer Cache section of this document for more information. If you wish to change the message queue limit, contact support@pubnub.com.	No throttling on keys in good standing (either any key with a paid plan present or keys on Free Tier at usage levels within the allowed limits). Use HTTP Pipelining for higher throughput.	Free Tier keys exceeding usage quotas are subject to deactivation without warning. For the first overage though, we will attempt to get in contact before disabling the keys. All other keys, N/A Error message (Channel quota exceeded)
# of users (publishers) per channel or keyset	Unlimited	N/A
Message Size	Less than < 30 KiB to be safe.	Length of GET request, including HTTP headers & URI encoding overhead (~32 KiB)	HTTP 400 error
Channel Name Length		2,048 characters
Channel ID Length		92 characters
User ID Length		92 characters
# of API keys per PubNub account?	An API is available if you need to manage an large number of keys (> 50). Contact us at support@pubnub.com if you need access to the Key Provisioning API.	Unlimited	N/A

Subscribe

Function	Soft Limit	Hard Limit	If hard limited is exceeded?
Subscribe Rate	Most of the considerations mentioned above in soft limits for publish rate are actually because of the limitations on the subscriber end (queue limit, round trips, etc).	No limit Use HTTP Streaming for maximum throughput N/A
# of Channels	Unlimited	N/A
# of Subscribers per channel or keyset	Unlimited	N/A
Message Buffer Cache	Size: 100 message queue TTL: 16 minutes maximum before cleared off the cache, but can be shorter (no guarantees). If longer than 8 to 10 minutes disconnect, use Message Persistence NOTE: Each socket connection has an in-memory message queue (FIFO) that holds onto recently published messages for the cache duration (12 to 16 minutes) and is limited to the most recent 100 messages. Consequently, publishing over 100 messages in the window of the subscribe reconnect time inevitably results in older messages overflowing the queue and getting discarded. For long term, reliable persistence and retrieval of missed messages, make sure you have Message Persistence enabled with a duration up to 6 months or even unlimited and use the Message Persistence API to retrieve those messages.	Size: Configurable on our end, may be added costs TTL: Currently defined with a hard limit of 20 minutes and a configurable effective percentage that controls the behavior of the network. A percentage of 90 would mean the effective TTL is 18 minutes. Currently it's set to 80% or 16 minutes.
Catch-Up	100 messages (or size of buffer cache)	N/A
Channel Name Length		2,048 characters
# of Sockets/Instances per client	PubNub does not limit the number of sockets/instances you can create, but TCP connections are typically limited by the device/platform (for instance, some browsers only allow up to 40 TCP connections). Keep in mind each PubNub client instance creates 2 TCP socket connections: one for subscribes and the other for non-subscribe operations.	Unlimited	N/A
Multiplexing (available without Stream Controller)	10 to 50 channels When subscribing to many channels, channel groups allows for the persistence of channel lists.	No limit in client SDKs, but we advertise a hard limit of 100 channels. No server side limit, only limited by URI length.
Channel Groups	Up to 10 channel groups, each with 100 channels for a total of 1,000 channels. You can change the limit of channels in the Admin Portal under your app's keyset configuration. Paid customers can increase the limit to up to 2,000 channels per channel group, for a total of 20,000 channels.	If subscribing to more than 10 channel groups, receive 400 HTTP status code with description Maximum channel registry count exceeded
Wildcard Subscribe	Depends on subscribe rate NOTE: refer to the note for Publish Rate	3 levels (2 dots) of wildcards: a. a.b. No limit to # of channels able to subscribe to in a wildcard subscribe. Wildcard Channel Names aren't allowed in Channel Groups.
Channel Group Name Length	92 Characters

File Sharing

Function	Soft Limit	If hard limited is exceeded?
File Size	5 MB	Contact us at support@pubnub.com to increase the file size limit.
File Retention	1, 3, 7, 15, or 30 days, or Unlimited

Presence

Function	Soft Limit	Hard Limit
Heartbeat	Minimum: 1 minute heartbeat & 29 second interval	Minimum: heartbeat:10; interval: 4 (lowest common denominator across 3.x SDKs; each have different hard limits) 4.x SDKs do not currently have limitations.
Presence Announce Max	100	We can adjust this limit, but there are considerations
Webhook Retries	Presence webhooks will try to POST to your URL endpoint for a maximum of 4 times, each with a 5s timeout; Ensure that the customer's server (REST endpoint) returns 200 NOTE: If a channel has reached the Presence Announce Max limit, we will not send webhook requests for that channel	If webhook has reached maximum number of retries, the request is lost.

Message Persistence

Function	Soft Limit	Hard Limit
Data Retention	1 day, 7 days, 30 days, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, or Unlimited	7 days for Free tier customers
Maximum # of channels with message count	100 channels per a single API call	N/A

App Context

Item	Soft Limit	Notes
Size of a record	32 KiB	Maximum size of a user or channel metadata stored in the database, including custom fields.
Max user metadata records	1 million	Recommended maximum number of user metadata records using App Context API.
Max channel metadata records	1 million	Recommended maximum number of channel metadata records using App Context API.
Members added in a channel	5,000	Recommended maximum number of members per channel using App Context API.
Memberships per user	50,000	Recommended maximum number of memberships per user using App Context API.
Members per transaction request	20	Maximum number of members added or removed in a single call using App Context API.

Endpoint	Item	Hard Limit	Notes
Set user metadata	name	2,048 characters	Maximum length of the name asigned to the User ID.
Set user metadata	externalId	2,048 characters	Maximum length of the user's identifier in an external system that you want to refer to.
Set user metadata	profileUrl	2,048 characters	Maximum length of the URL to an image that can be used to visually represent the user.
Set user metadata	email	320 characters	Maximum length of the user' email address.
Set user metadata	type	50 characters	Maximum length of the tag that lets you categorize a user by their functional role. Limited to alphanumeric characters (0-9, a-z, A-Z) and the period/dot character (.).
Set user metadata	status	50 characters	Maximum length of the tag that lets you categorize a user by their current state. Limited to alphanumeric characters (0-9, a-z, A-Z) and the period/dot character (.).
Set user metadata	custom	9007199254740991	If you set custom fields with integer values, do not specify numbers larger than 9007199254740991 due to precision limitations in JSON implementations. For large integer values, for example PubNub timetoken values, use string values instead of integers.
Set channel metadata	description	2,048 characters	Maximum length of additional channel information.
Set channel metadata	type	50 characters	Maximum length of the tag that lets you categorize a channel by its functional role. Limited to alphanumeric characters (0-9, a-z, A-Z) and the period/dot character (.).
Set channel metadata	status	50 characters	Maximum length of the tag that lets you categorize a channel by its current state. Limited to alphanumeric characters (0-9, a-z, A-Z) and the period/dot character (.).
Set channel metadata	custom	9007199254740991	If you set custom fields with integer values, do not specify numbers larger than 9007199254740991 due to precision limitations in JSON implementations. For large integer values, for example PubNub timetoken values, use string values instead of integers.
Set channel membership metadata	type	50 characters	Maximum length of the tag that lets you categorize a membership by its functional role. Limited to alphanumeric characters (0-9, a-z, A-Z) and the period/dot character (.).
Set channel membership metadata	status	50 characters	Maximum length of the tag that lets you categorize a membership by its current state. Limited to alphanumeric characters (0-9, a-z, A-Z) and the period/dot character (.).
Set channel membership metadata	custom	9007199254740991	If you set custom fields with integer values, do not specify numbers larger than 9007199254740991 due to precision limitations in JSON implementations. For large integer values, for example PubNub timetoken values, use string values instead of integers.
Set channel members' metadata	type	50 characters	Maximum length of the tag that lets you categorize a channel member by their functional role. Limited to alphanumeric characters (0-9, a-z, A-Z) and the period/dot character (.).
Set channel members' metadata	status	50 characters	Maximum length of the tag that lets you categorize a channel member by their current state. Limited to alphanumeric characters (0-9, a-z, A-Z) and the period/dot character (.).
Set channel members' metadata	custom	9007199254740991	If you set custom fields with integer values, do not specify numbers larger than 9007199254740991 due to precision limitations in JSON implementations. For large integer values, for example PubNub timetoken values, use string values instead of integers.

Mobile Push

Function	Soft Limit
# of Push Certificates	1 APNs certificate & 1 FCM key per PubNub Key Set
Push Notification Message Size	Maximum: 2 kB for APNs, 4 kB for FCM

Access Manager

Function	Soft Limit	Hard Limit
# of Tokens	No limits	N/A
Grant latency	Server to server (grant by server for server usage), give it 1 second between grant and usage Separate process (server grant, client usage), wait for grant callback before returning to client	N/A
Channels per grant	200	N/A

Functions

Activity	Soft Limit	Hard Limit
Number of Modules/Functions	10 modules per key	If you'd like a larger limit, contact support.
Number of Outbound Calls	10 requests per request type in a function execution (request types include PubNub API, xhr, and KVStore calls)	If you'd like a larger limit, contact support.
Rate Limit for Outbound Calls	100 total requests / second (include PubNub API, xhr and KVStore calls)	If you'd like a larger limit, contact support.
Execution Recursion Limit	Depth = 3, meaning how many recursions but also how many Function Types chaining	If you'd like a larger limit, contact support.
CPU Wall Time	10 seconds	If you'd like a larger limit, contact support.
KV Store Get Keys Limit for single call	100 Keys	If you'd like a larger limit, contact support.
KV Store Byte Size Limit for Keys	1KB	1KB
KV Store Byte Size Limit for Values	32KB	32KB
Max Interval for Interval Functions	1 hour	If you'd like a larger limit, contact support.
Number of console debug/error messages	250 messages	If you'd like a larger limit, contact support.

Events & Actions

Item	Free	Intro	Tier 1	Tier 2	Tier 3	Tier 4	Tier 5	Tier 6
Max events ingested	10K	2M	4M	25M	66M	200M	500M	Unlimited
Listeners	1	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Actions per listener	1	3	3	3	3	3	Unlimited