Launched this week
Midway Chat
Real-time member chat for Memberstack and Webflow sites
68 followers
Real-time member chat for Memberstack and Webflow sites
68 followers
Midway is one iframe embed, built specifically around Memberstack auth and Webflow, so setup takes minutes. Members get real-time DMs, voice notes, replies, reactions, typing indicators, read receipts, online presence, and chat-request gating to block spam. Your site stays the home of your community.
Midway Chat
Real-time presence, typing indicators, and read receipts inside an iframe usually means a persistent websocket connection per active user. For a Webflow site that could have hundreds of members active at once, what does that look like cost and infra-wise on your end, is pricing usage-based on concurrent connections, or flat regardless of how active the community gets?
Midway Chat
@ansari_adin Great question. Short version: it isn't one always-on websocket per member. The connection only exists while a member has the inbox open and if they close the tab and it tears down. Most active members open the inbox for a small fraction of their session, so peak concurrent connections are typically a small fraction of total MAU.
Under the hood the realtime layer is managed pub/sub: an open inbox subscribes to two channels, the current conversation and a personal notifications channel, and messages, typing indicators, reactions, and read receipts all ride through those as discrete events rather than continuous streams. Cost scales with message volume and peak concurrents, not with how many "active" members exist on paper.
Presence specifically is handled with a lightweight heartbeat into our own database rather than holding a presence slot per active user in the realtime backend, materially cheaper at scale and it survives reloads and it gives the same green-dot UX.
On pricing, Midway is flat MAU-based, not connection-based, with plans at 50 / 500 / 2500 MAU for now across Free, Starter, and Studio. Realtime cost is our problem to solve, not the customer's: the tiers are sized so a heavily active community still fits comfortably inside our realtime cost structure.
@magnaem That's a more sophisticated infra approach than most embedded chat tools at this price point, the heartbeat presence trick especially makes sense as a cost lever at scale.
I run community launches, and the Memberstack-native part is the real unlock — chat that inherits the membership instead of living in a separate Discord with its own login and lost branding. The edge case I'd test first: when someone is downgraded or removed in Memberstack, does Midway revoke their chat access and DM ability in real time, or is there a sync lag where a churned member can still message people? And do their earlier DMs stay visible to the other party once they lose access?
Midway Chat
@hazy0 All really good questions!
When you remove someone in Memberstack, their login to your site is gone the moment you do it. Because Midway sits inside your site (it uses your Memberstack login, not its own), a removed member can't reach the chat at all from that point on. They can't sign in, can't load the page, can't message anyone. That part is real-time.
On the sync lag you're asking about: Midway's own member directory does lag until the next sync runs. They may still appear in your active member list for a bit. But that only affects what you see. A removed member can't reach the chat to send anything in the meantime, because they've already lost site access. You control the cadence too: run a sync on-demand from your dashboard, or set a schedule (daily, weekly, or monthly at any time you pick).
Their earlier DMs: they stay for the person on the other side. If Sarah and Jane were DMing and Jane gets removed, Sarah keeps the full conversation with Jane's name and photo intact. Jane can't get back in to read it (no site access), but Sarah doesn't lose the history she built with her.
On downgrades: Midway currently treats membership as yes or no. If you need "chat is a Pro-tier feature," the way to do it today is to only show the chat embed on pages Pro members can reach.
Are most users creators monetizing a membership, or businesses adding chat to a site?
Any plans to surface what members talk about back to the creator?