Air Pipe covers the realtime fundamentals — WebSocket and MQTT pub/sub, presence, history-rewind and retained messages — and then does what a relay cannot: the same connection runs your pipeline on each message, with your own logic as the channel ACL. One vendor for the socket and the backend behind it.
Wildcards, presence, message history-rewind and retained values all live in the WebSocket channel API, with global reach across geo-routed nodes. MQTT reaches the same delivery guarantees the native broker way — persistent sessions, QoS 1/2 and retained. You're not trading away realtime features to get the rest.
A relay moves bytes between clients and stops there. Air Pipe can run your config on each message before it fans out — assert on it, transform it, write it to Postgres or MongoDB, call an upstream API — and gate each channel with your own pipeline logic against the user's JWT claims. The realtime layer and the backend are the same thing.
With a relay you still bring your own backend, your own auth service and the glue between them. Air Pipe is transport, per-user auth, the compute that runs on each message, and billing in one product — metered in the same request units as everything else you run, which roll over for 12 months.
Run realtime on our managed cloud, or self-host the same single binary on your own infrastructure — nothing-shared either way, with no external broker or Redis to operate. Self-hosted realtime connections aren't billed.
Out of the box, Air Pipe doesn't advertise the edge footprint or published SLAs of a dedicated global realtime network. But extreme scale is a conversation, not a wall: if you need very large connection counts or dedicated capacity, we scale out or provision dedicated infrastructure for you — talk to us. For most products the better fit is realtime that's part of your backend, runs your logic on each message, and self-hosts on infrastructure you own — and that's there from day one.