When you actually need real-time
'Real-time' means the screen updates without anyone hitting refresh — a message arrives, a number ticks up, another user's cursor moves, an order status flips. It's the difference between a page that shows you stale data and one that feels alive.
It's the right tool for a specific set of problems. We'll help you tell the difference between features that genuinely need a live connection and ones where a periodic refresh is simpler, cheaper, and perfectly fine.
- Chat and messaging with delivery and read states
- Live dashboards that update as new data lands
- Collaborative editing and shared views where multiple people work at once
- Live notifications and activity feeds
- Presence indicators (who's online, who's typing, who's viewing)
- Location or status tracking that moves on the screen as it changes
The engineering that makes it reliable
The hard part of real-time isn't sending one message — it's what happens when a phone drops off wifi, when a user reconnects, when thousands of connections are open at once, and when two people change the same thing at the same moment.
We build for those realities from the start: reconnection handling, message ordering, and a data model that stays correct under concurrent edits. Cutting those corners is exactly what makes real-time features feel flaky.
- Websocket connections with automatic reconnect and missed-message recovery
- Graceful fallback and clear states when a connection drops
- A backend that can hold many live connections without falling over
- Conflict handling for collaborative edits
- Load testing against realistic concurrent usage before launch
- A path to scale the real-time layer independently as usage grows
More on software development
Frequently asked questions
How many simultaneous users can it handle?
That depends on what each connection is doing and how the system is architected — a light presence indicator scales very differently from live collaborative editing. We design and load-test against your expected numbers rather than quoting a figure that sounds impressive but means nothing without context.
Do you build the mobile side too, or just the web?
Both are possible. Real-time features can run in a web app and in mobile apps against the same backend. We'll scope which clients you need on a free consultation.
Is real-time overkill for my idea?
Sometimes, yes — and we'll say so. If updates every few seconds would serve your users just as well, a simpler approach saves you money and complexity. We'd rather right-size it than sell you the fancier version.