Articles · October 21, 2026
HiveMQ Cloud Serverless is shutting down: how to migrate before December 31, 2026
HiveMQ Cloud Serverless was the free MQTT broker a lot of hobby projects ran on: create a cluster, get a hostname, connect your ESP32 or Home Assistant over TLS. HiveMQ is now retiring the plan, and if your devices still point at a *.hivemq.cloud hostname, they will stop working at the end of the year.
The key dates
| Date | What happens |
|---|---|
| September 30, 2026 | End of sale: no new Serverless clusters, no upgrades to Pay As You Go |
| December 31, 2026 | End of life: MQTT clients can no longer connect |
| January 7, 2027 | HiveMQ permanently deletes all Serverless clusters and their data |
If you received HiveMQ's retirement email, it also mentions a free migration license for the self-managed HiveMQ Enterprise Broker, and HiveMQ points paying users to its Starter plan.
What the free plan gave you
Serverless was generous for hobbyists: up to 100 concurrent sessions and 10 GB of traffic per month on a shared, multi-tenant broker, with MQTT 3.1.1 and MQTT 5 over TLS on port 8883 and secure WebSockets on port 8884. There was no uptime SLA, retained messages expired after three days, and there was no message history: once a message was delivered, it was gone.
Your options
- HiveMQ Cloud Starter. A dedicated cluster billed by usage, starting at $0.34 per hour plus $0.80 per million messages. That is roughly $245 to $253 a month before messages, which is hard to justify for a weather station.
- Another cloud's free tier. EMQX Serverless, for example, includes 1 million session minutes and 1 GB of traffic per month, and stops the deployment when the quota runs out.
- Self-hosting Mosquitto. Free and fully under your control, but you now own a server, TLS certificates, updates, backups and authentication.
- A free hosted broker built for hobby projects, like mqtty.
Why mqtty is the shortest path
mqtty was built for people leaving Serverless. It keeps the details your firmware already depends on:
- Same ports: MQTT over TLS on 8883, secure WebSockets on 8884 at
/mqtt. - Same topics: every account gets a private namespace, so
home/livingroom/tempstayshome/livingroom/temp. No prefixes to add. - MQTT 3.1, 3.1.1 and 5, QoS 0 to 2, retained messages, last will and persistent sessions.
On top of that you get things Serverless never had: a live dashboard that shows every message your devices send and receive, and 60 days of message history. The free plan covers 6 connected devices and 30 messages per minute per account, which fits most home and hobby setups.
Migrating step by step
- Sign in at broker.mqtty.com with Google.
- Create a credential in the dashboard. You can let mqtty generate the username and password, or pick your own.
- In your firmware or app, change the host from
xxxx.s1.eu.hivemq.cloudtobroker.mqtty.com. - Replace the username and password. Keep port 8883 (or 8884 for WebSockets) and keep your topics.
- Flash or restart the device and watch it appear under Connected devices in the dashboard.
If your device pins a root certificate, mqtty uses Let's Encrypt and serves a chain that validates against ISRG Root X1 on the MQTT ports, the root most ESP32 tutorials already use.
Don't wait for December
The cutoff is a hard one: after December 31, 2026 clients cannot connect, and a week later the data is gone. Moving one device takes a couple of minutes, and you can run both brokers side by side while you switch. Create a free mqtty account and move your first device today.
mqtty gives every account 6 devices, 30 messages per minute and 60 days of history, with TLS and a live dashboard.
Start free with mqtty →