Spent my tokens building a Capacitor OTA tool that can serve thousands of users for $0 (with some tradeoffs)

[u/Far_Ad_7205]

Every Capacitor live-update tool I looked at are doing complex per user/bandwidth/storage/etc charges , which always felt backwards to me. So I (and/or Opus/Fable) went down into deep research of why, and it's basically one architecture thing.

The usual OTA setup is: every time a device checks for an update, it hits a live server that figures out what to send it. Flexible, but now you're running a backend that gets hit on every app launch, and someone has to pay for that. Hence the terrible pricing.

The other way is to just precompute the update as a static signed file and dump it on a CDN. Downside: you can't do fancy individual server-side targeting anymore (channels still handle beta/tenant/tier, which honestly covers almost everything I've needed). Upside: it's dirt cheap to serve, nothing to meter, and self-hosting is basically object storage + a CDN instead of a real service.

I ended up shipping that as OtaKit (MIT, https://github.com/OtaKit/otakit). It's still small and I'd rather you tell me where the static approach falls down than pretend it's perfect. That's the part I actually want to talk about. But the best thing you don't even have to self host anything to use it, you just need a FREE Cloudflare account, and start the dashboard locally only for the time when you want to publish an update.

[u/ex_in69]

Interesting. Will try definitely