The Liveblocks Collaboration Developer

“What was the moment this product clicked?” — share yours

A frontend or full-stack developer at a SaaS company whose product needs real-time collaboration — multiple users working in the same document, canvas, or interface simultaneously. They've looked at building it themselves. The WebSocket infrastructure, the conflict resolution, the presence system, the storage — it's 3–6 months of work that isn't their product. They chose Liveblocks to compress that into a week. They are now the person at their company who knows how Liveblocks works. This is a niche form of expertise they didn't expect to develop.

• →Ship collaborative features that feel like Figma or Notion — not like a demo
• →Handle conflict resolution and state sync without managing WebSocket infrastructure
• →Give users presence awareness (cursors, avatars, indicators) that makes collaboration visible

• —The debugging experience when real-time state gets out of sync in ways that
• —are hard to reproduce locally
• —Pricing that scales with concurrent users in ways that are hard to predict for
• —products with uneven usage patterns
• —Collaborative text editing that requires understanding CRDTs at a depth they
• —didn't expect to need
• —The gap between Liveblocks' primitives and the specific collaborative behavior
• —their product needs — sometimes a perfect fit, sometimes a significant adaptation

• Real-time collaboration is a product expectation now, not a premium feature
• The infrastructure for multiplayer is solved — the question is which abstraction
• layer to use, not whether to build the layer yourself
• A collaborative feature that loses data or shows phantom cursors is worse than
• no collaborative feature

Uses Liveblocks in a React application, likely with Next.js. Has implemented presence (online indicators, cursor positions) and Liveblocks Storage for shared state. May be using Yjs integration for collaborative text editing. Has Liveblocks DevTools open during development. Monitors room counts and connection counts in the Liveblocks dashboard. Has a staging environment where collaborative features are tested with multiple browser windows before reaching production. Has explained Liveblocks to one engineer who was skeptical and one PM who immediately asked for more features.

• →DevTools that show room state history and event replay enable time-travel debugging
• →for the "what happened to make this get out of sync" investigation
• →Pricing models that account for activity patterns rather than raw concurrent users
• →make cost estimation predictable for products with burst usage
• →Collaborative text editing abstractions that handle CRDT complexity behind a
• →familiar editor interface reduce the expertise requirement for the most complex feature type
• →Conflict resolution visualizations in the dashboard help developers understand
• →how their storage operations resolved during simultaneous edits

Pairs with `figma-primary-user` for the design reference of what collaborative feature fidelity looks like from a user perspective. Contrast with `retool-primary-user` for the collaborative internal tool vs. collaborative product feature use case. Use with `supabase-primary-user` for teams using Supabase for database and Liveblocks for the real-time layer.