Backpressure

“Flow control for your family group chat. Your mom’s producer is running at 412 msgs/hr. Your consumer capacity is 3 msgs/hr on a good day. We insert a shim upstream, propagate backpressure via a never-ending ‘you are typing…’, and if she keeps going, we drop-tail the Zillow listings and return a polite 429 in your tone.”

The Problem

In every family group chat there is exactly one unbounded producer and four bounded consumersquietly swelling. The queue has no lid. Last Tuesday your buffer overflowed and you “accidentally” muted the chat for 800 years. Your dad noticed. He did not say anything, which is somehow worse.

The Solution

We sit between mom and you as a reactive stream operator. We measure queue depth, and when the buffer crosses the high-water mark we push a backpressure signal upstream — implemented as an indefinite “you are typing…”. Mom sees you composing a thoughtful reply and slows, out of politeness. She does not know that you are, in fact, at brunch.

Signal Palette

Backpressure is a spectrum, not a boolean. We escalate gently, only switching modes when the producer misreads earlier signals.

Live: The “You Are Typing” Signal

Our headline feature. Reproduced faithfully from a real customer whose mother has not stopped sending Zillow listings from Boise since Q4.

SEV-1 · Sunday Zillow Storm

A cautionary tale. Our monitoring caught it, our runbook worked, and no one had to move to Idaho.

Pricing

TAM

The Ask

$5M seed. Half to the streaming infra. The other half to the poet we hired to write 400 variations of “omg cute!” that all sound like you.

Series A pitch:“We’re Kafka for your mom. The topic is your childhood bedroom in Boise.”