Introduction

Simple Presence is a hosted real-time presence service that lets you see how many users are active on any page or feature of your application — with just a few lines of code.

What is Simple Presence?

At its core, Simple Presence tracks who's here right now. It gives you a live count of active users for any "tag" you define — a page, a feature, a room, a document — and keeps that count synchronized across all connected clients in real time.

How it works

1. Install the SDK — pick your framework binding (@simple-presence/react, @simple-presence/solid-js) or the framework-agnostic core.
2. Create an app — sign in to the dashboard, create an app, and grab your app key.
3. Add a hook — call usePresenceCount("my-tag", { appKey }) in your component. That's it.

Under the hood, the SDK opens a WebSocket to our edge infrastructure (Cloudflare Durable Objects), subscribes to a presence stream for the tag you chose, and handles reconnection, visibility changes, and connection sharing automatically.

Key concepts

Tags

A tag is any string that identifies a logical "room" or "channel". Users subscribed to the same tag can see each other's presence. Tags are scoped to your app key, so they won't collide with other apps.

App Key

Your app key identifies your application. You get one when you create an app in the dashboard. It's safe to expose in client-side code — it only grants read/subscribe access.

Client ID

Each browser gets a stable, anonymous client ID persisted in localStorage (with a cookie fallback). This prevents double-counting when a user has multiple tabs open.

Supported frameworks

• React (@simple-presence/react)
• SolidJS (@simple-presence/solid-js)
• Vanilla JS / TS (@simple-presence/core)
• Any framework via the core package

Next steps

Ready to get started? Follow the Quick Start guide to have real-time presence running in under 5 minutes.