Set up your account
The first step of working with PubNub is to create an account. To do that, sign up using the Admin Portal, which is PubNub's single entry point for all things that relate to your account's configuration.
Public Admin Portal demo
Want to browse through the Admin Portal without creating an account? Explore it through the Public Demo that shows examples of most PubNub features for transport and logistics use case.
Sign up
Don't feel like leaving this page to sign up?
When you log in to the Admin Portal for the first time, you'll need to create your own application and keyset. You can create keysets for both testing and production environments as needed for your development workflow.
To get started with PubNub:
- Create a new application for your project
- Generate a new keyset within that application
Each keyset contains a publish key and a subscribe key, which you need to include in your app. The Admin Portal also allows you to configure PubNub features, such as Presence, App Context, or Message Persistence.
Note that for production keysets, you'll need to be subscribed to at least the Starter plan. Free tier keysets are suitable for development and testing only.
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.
Head to the PubNub Account Setup section to find out how to create different types of keysets for different environments. Then, refer to the Admin Portal documentation to learn how to create and configure your keyset.
Pricing
We offer a free plan with basic support for testing and development. When you're ready to move to production or exceed 200 monthly active users (MAUs) and/or 1 million transactions/Functions executions, you need to upgrade to a paid account.
MAUs are unique users (with unique user IDs) that connect to PubNub at least once in a calendar month and send an API call. If you'd rather pay for transactions, you may consider transaction-based pricing.
Now that you have a brand new keyset at your disposal, let's get you an SDK to use.