PubNub · Rate Limits

Pubnub Rate Limits

PubNub does not publish per-second rate limits in the same way as competitors because billing is by MAU and transactions are unlimited within tier. Soft fair-use protections apply per publish key (typically 100 publishes per second per channel). Functions invocations are capped per second per function. Throttled responses return HTTP 429.

Pubnub Rate Limits is the machine-readable rate-limit profile for PubNub on the APIs.io network, in the API Commons Rate Limits shape.

It captures 3 rate-limit definitions, measuring messages_per_second, invocations_per_second, and mau_per_month.

An exhausted limit returns HTTP 429.

This profile was written by API Evangelist and has not been verified against a page the provider published; treat every limit as unconfirmed until a dated transcription replaces it.

The profile also includes 2 backoff/retry policies defined and response codes documented for throttled.

Tagged areas include Realtime and Rate Limiting.

3 Limits Exhausted: HTTP 429
Method: generated, dated 2026-05-08.
Written by API Evangelist on 2026-05-08 and not verified against a page the provider published. Treat every limit as unconfirmed until a dated transcription replaces it.
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RealtimeRate Limiting

Limits

Per-channel publish (soft) channel
messages_per_second
100
Soft fair-use; shard across channels for higher rates.
Functions per-instance function
invocations_per_second
100
Per-deployed-function fair-use.
MAU monthly cap account
mau_per_month
-1
Per plan tier; see plans file.

Policies

Backoff Strategy
Honor 429 Retry-After and apply exponential backoff with jitter.
Channel sharding
Use channel groups and sharded channels to scale beyond per-channel publish soft limit.

Sources

Work with this as data

Every rate limit here is available over the APIs.io API and to AI agents over MCP.

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Tools for rate limits

4 MCP tools reach this
  • find_rate_limitsBrowse and filter every rate limit in the catalog.
  • apis_io_searchSTART HERE — APIs, providers and tags for one query, each with its total.
  • resolveTurn a domain, URL or GitHub org into the provider it belongs to.
  • find_cohortsEvery scored population of providers in the catalog.
All 92 tools →

Call it yourself

curl for this page
This rate limit 
curl "https://apis.io/api/v1/rate-limits/pubnub-rate-limits"
All rate limits 
curl "https://apis.io/api/v1/rate-limits?limit=25"

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