Short answer: put a small, explicit quota boundary in front of every realtime connection, make reconnect and backfill consume a separate budget, and measure freshness rather than WebSocket count. For a live auction dashboard, this keeps a reconnect storm from starving the bids, typing indicators, and read receipts that operators actually need. The page that wakes the on-call engineer is usually not the page they needed. It says realtime_connections > 50,000 or reports a spike of HTTP 429...