Chatkit is now out of beta ? Build the in-app messaging experience your users de...

Today we are excited to announce thatChatkit is g enerally a vailable. For the last year, we’ve been hard at work scaling our infrastructure and developing new features based on the feedback we received from more than 8,000 beta testers.

What is Chatkit?

Chatkit is a set of APIs that enables you to build bespoke in-app messaging inside your mobile and web apps. It comes with out-of-the-box features that your end users expect to see in any in-app chat such as:

• typing indicators
• file & images sharing
• online presence
• roles & permissions
• read cursors

… and more, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

We’ve set out to build Chatkit based on the feedback of our Channels users that were fed up with the lack of extensibility and customizability of off-the-shelf solutions like Zendesk Chat and Intercom, or messaging platforms such as WhatsApp and Facebook messenger. They wanted to build a chat experience that fits their business needs and own their own data.

:jp: Philip Butkiewicz, CTO, Kenja Corporation , the most popular enterprise cloud collaboration platform provider in Japan:

 “We were impressed by Chatkit’s simplicity as we were able to go from zero to a custom chat solution in just a few days. Pusher’s JS library was perfect for us to get up and running quickly – and it gave us the ability to cater to our customers’ specific UX needs.” 

Haven’t tried Chatkit yet? Create your account and access the shiny new dashboard!

What’s new in Chatkit

Right after the beta launch, we heard your requests for more SDKs in the languages you know best and love working with – so we released both new client and server SDKs. We also added some new features that bring even more out-of-the-box functionality such as:

• Roles & permissions – create custom roles within your Chatkit instances to differentiate how users interact with your chat
• Read cursors – track how far a user has read through the messages in a room
• Instance Inspector – inspect what is happening with users, rooms, messages, and roles in your instance
• Rich media support – add attachments to messages. ( note: this feature is remaining in beta for now**, but a general availability update is coming soon! )

We’ve also added some new SDKs, and updated the existing ones:

Client SDKs iOS JavaScript Android Server SDKs Node.js Ruby PHP Go

Pricing

At Pusher we always want to offer a generous forever free plan that allows you to test out all the features, and this is still true with Chatkit. The Sandbox plan gives you ample limits to develop and deploy to production for side projects or new apps. We then offer a $499 paid plan that comes with higher limits.

Because we know that every in-app messaging use case is different, we offer tailored made plans so you only pay for the features and APIs that you use. You can see all Chatkit’s features and learn more about its pricing on our new pricing page here .

What’s Next?

We have a roadmap packed with features to help you build the in-app experience your users want.

Here is a small teaser of what is coming out in the next few months:

• Custom Data for Rooms
• Multi-part Messages
• New and improved Files API (rich media support out of beta!)
• Beams push notification support and fallback
• Webhooks
• End-to-end encryption

As always, we’d love your feedback, so let us know what you think! You can reach out to us at [email protected].

In the meantime, why not give Chatkit a try? Sign in or create your free account to get a free Chat API key here.

Happy coding!