Stack
- Node.js
- React Native
- AWS
- PostgreSQL
01/
“Serve audio to 635K users without giving it away”
- The hard problem
- A global audio hypnotherapy app with 635K+ combined downloads. The paid audio content is the entire business — it can’t leak. But it also has to stream fast to hundreds of thousands of users worldwide. Serving files directly exposes them to scraping; locking them down too hard kills performance.
- What the team built
- A signed-URL delivery pipeline — the backend verifies the user’s subscription entitlement, then issues a short-TTL signed CDN URL (CloudFront) pointing at private, encrypted S3 storage. The audio is never directly downloadable, the URL expires in minutes, and the CDN signature uses a separate key from the app’s auth. Fast global delivery via CDN edge caching, content protected at every layer. Plus a Next.js admin dashboard for the client to manage content and push notifications independently.
- Why it matters
- Balancing content protection against global streaming performance is a real architecture tradeoff, solved cleanly — at consumer scale.
“With over 600K downloads, every rough edge shows. They kept the app fast and stable at a scale most teams never have to deal with.”
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