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.

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 might notice that a demo app and a demo keyset have been created for you. They are there to help you get started with various PubNub features, and have a number of PubNub services enabled by default which you can play around with. As convenient as the demo keyset is, it's also rate-limited, which means it's not suitable for production use.

We recommend that you create a new app and generate a new keyset to use for development. 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.

Head to the PubNub Account Setup section to find out how to create different types of keysets for different environments. Then, read 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.