What's the catch?

A real-time widget with unlimited viewers, on a free plan, from a company you've never heard of — that's a fair thing to be suspicious of. Free tools have a habit of paying for themselves in ways their users only discover later. So here is how Tapback pays for itself: the expensive-looking half of live reactions costs very little on the infrastructure we run on, the paid plans and the logomark on free bars cover the rest, and there are no ads, no trackers, and no reader data to sell — readers are anonymous by design, so there's nothing about them to monetize.

What a reaction costs us

Every reactions bar is backed by a small stateful object at Cloudflare's edge. When nobody is reacting it sleeps, and a sleeping room bills us $0 — even with thousands of viewers still connected, because their keep-alive pings are answered by the runtime without waking it. When someone taps, the tap is buffered for up to 250 milliseconds and lands as a couple of database rows, however many taps arrived in that window. And the broadcast out — the part that feels like it should be expensive — is free on Cloudflare's pricing: outgoing WebSocket messages aren't billed, at any audience size. "Unlimited viewers on every plan" is us passing that line item through to you.

Add up the parts that are metered — inbound messages, database writes, the seconds a room spends awake — and a million reactions cost us single-digit dollars. A free Tapbar running flat out until it hits the free plan's 200,000/month ceiling costs us under a dollar; a typical blog costs pennies a year. We re-checked every one of those rates against Cloudflare's published pricing in July 2026 and set the plans from that cost model.

Storing less is the other half

Most of what makes a free tier expensive elsewhere is machinery we never built. There are no reader accounts, sessions, or profiles to store — a viewer is a short-lived anonymous token that expires in minutes. Analytics are counters: daily series and top pages, aggregated from anonymous events, with no per-person anything underneath. No cookies means no consent infrastructure. The embed is ~9KB gzipped and loads its live core only when a bar scrolls into view, so even our bandwidth bill stays small. Collecting less data made the product cheaper to run and left nothing lying around worth selling.

Who pays for what

The free tier is our marketing budget. Free bars carry a small Tapback logomark that links back to us, and caps sized for a personal site: 3 reactions per bar, 20 bars, 25,000 reactions a day, 200,000 a month — one viral day is free, a month of them is a paid workload. If your site outgrows that, the paid plans buy headroom — Plus ($12/year) raises the caps, unlocks custom icons and live presence, and removes the logomark; Pro ($99/year) is for sites doing up to a million reactions a day. Daily caps and per-reader rate limits bound what any single Tapbar can cost us, so a free tenant can never quietly become a loss that ads or data sales would have to cover.

You don't have to take our word for it

Leaving is cheap too. One click exports everything as JSON or CSV, and the static archive renders your final counts on your own pages forever, with zero calls back to us. Your counts are durable, portable, and yours — if Tapback disappeared tomorrow, your bars would keep rendering.