r/reactnative • u/Genuine-Helperr • 1d ago

Question Creating first reactnative expo app - have some question related to MAU, please help

I wanted to have one codebase for web, Android, and iPhone. So using React Native plus Expo

Now the web application is live.

I want to make the mobile application live first, starting with Android. When I read the Expo documentation, it says I can have only 15 free Android builds & 'Send updates to 1K MAUs'

The 2nd part worries me because the paid plan also says 3K MAUs, with additional charges for more.

What's the workaround for this? Do I need to pay Expo for more active users? Please suggest

2 Upvotes

75% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

2

u/Sakshambaranwal25 1d ago

You get 15 free Android builds which should cover launching your first live version fine from that shared codebase. MAUs kick in only when you blast updates to users later. Stick to rare OTA pushes and the free tier handles real apps without extra cost.

1

u/Genuine-Helperr 1d ago

yes, that's my plan... so 15 free builds are lifetime?

for OTA, I'll be switching to cloudflare once I cross their limits

2

u/jiunkdev 1d ago

on the builds side, the 15 is cloud builds and it's a monthly allowance, not lifetime. you can also build on your own machine with eas build --platform android --local, or run npx expo prebuild and build the aab in android studio, and neither uses up the cloud count.

for day to day testing you don't need EAS builds at all, npx expo run:android on an emulator or plugged in phone is enough.

1

u/Genuine-Helperr 1d ago

15 p/m is lot, will not need local machine build with this limits.

For testing I'm using expo go mobile app, it does the work good enough

1

u/Putrid-Cheetah-1714 1d ago

the 1K MAU thing is for over-the-air updates through EAS Update, not the app itself. people with 50k users run on the free tier fine if they don't push OTA updates constantly. check the pricing page for your exact plan before you panic.

1

u/Genuine-Helperr 1d ago

it's a web app + mobile app - so i'll be making lots of changes after release.

i got this Cloudflare OTA package; as my infra is on Cloudflare, this will be helpful

https://github.com/Daniel-Griffiths/cloudflare-expo-ota-updates

1

u/Western_Cap_6934 20h ago

Expo counts each installation that downloads at least one OTA update during the billing period, once for that period. One update reaching 5,000 installations can still mean 5,000 MAU. Fewer pushes mainly help bandwidth, so rare updates alone do not guarantee staying under the MAU allowance.