EMQX Serverless is a fully managed, pay-as-you-go MQTT broker for IoT from EMQ. See pricing, free tier limits, key features, and who it's built for.
EMQX Serverless is a cloud-hosted, pay-as-you-go version of EMQX, the open-source MQTT broker that EMQ first released in 2013. MQTT is the standard lightweight publish-subscribe messaging protocol underpinning most IoT deployments, and EMQX Serverless removes the operational burden of running and scaling an MQTT broker by billing purely on usage — session minutes and data traffic — rather than requiring customers to size and manage server instances.
EMQ, the company behind EMQX, operates from offices including Menlo Park, California, with additional R&D and business hubs internationally, and counts large industrial and automotive customers such as BMW, Ericsson, Geely, and Volkswagen among its 1,500+ enterprise clients across its broader product line.
The defining feature of EMQX Serverless is instant deployment — teams can spin up a working MQTT endpoint in seconds without capacity planning, and the service automatically scales connections up or down based on real device activity. Billing is granular: one session minute represents one client connected for one minute, with partial minutes rounded up, so costs track actual usage rather than reserved capacity.
Because it's built on the mature EMQX broker, Serverless inherits features like rule-based data processing (routing MQTT messages to databases, message queues, or webhooks), multi-cloud availability across supported public cloud regions, and compatibility with the standard MQTT protocol used by most IoT device SDKs and gateways.
EMQX Serverless includes a forever-free tier of 1 million session minutes, 1 GB of data traffic, and 1 million rule action executions per month — enough, per EMQ's own example, to keep about 23 devices connected around the clock for a full month at no cost.
Beyond the free quota, pricing is pay-as-you-go based on session minutes and data traffic consumed, with exact rates varying slightly by the public cloud platform and region selected for deployment. There's no fixed monthly minimum, so costs scale directly with the number of connected devices and their online time.
It includes a forever-free tier of 1 million session minutes, 1 GB of data traffic, and 1 million rule action executions per month; usage beyond that is billed pay-as-you-go.
One session minute equals one client connected to the deployment for one minute, with any partial minute rounded up and billed in full.
Yes, it's built on EMQX, EMQ's open-source MQTT broker first released in 2013, though the Serverless cloud offering itself is a paid managed service.
EMQ estimates the free 1 million session minutes is enough to keep about 23 devices connected 24/7 for a full month.
Yes, EMQ also offers self-hosted and enterprise-managed EMQX deployments for teams that prefer to run their own infrastructure.