Hey, I’m Martin Donadieu,
In July 2021, I left Naas the startup I cofounded in 2019 to build project in solo.
During the first 6 months of my solo journey I focused on rebooting my project Captime, a mobile app I did 4 years earlier, who became a side business with the covid.
In December 2021, While I was rebuilding the app from zero, I got some issue with the current production version,
and things got messy, i had to fix it, but I wanted to avoid releasing a new version, so I searched for a solution to push code updates to my app.
At the time, Captime was making $400/month, so I was looking for an affordable solution, Ionic Appflow was out of my budget.
The only other alternative was Microsoft App Center, but they shut down support for apps running on Cordova / Capacitor.
If you are a solo developer like me, you will find that Ionic AppFlow is not the best Price for you.
Like you, I was complaining about it, I contacted Ionic, they understood the complaint, but there weren’t open to change the pricing, i wasn’t the target.
So, I decided to try to fix my biggest pain in my Capacitor JS development workflow: Live updates.
After one month of trying, I found a way to download from one URL a zip and replace the source of the app.
I shared about it and got huge interest on GitHub.
That was too manual for most teams, so they asked for a paid service, that was where I started to work on Capgo as AppFlow alternative.
The goal was to provide a simple and easy to use solution to push code updates to Capacitor JavaScript apps.
No Native build, not big toolbox like Ionic, just live updates, for the market they don’t address, Us.
I contacted them to share with them what I was doing, and we found a business friendship agreement.
I build for the maker, they build for the business that need CI/CD and dedicated support :)
You are welcome to join the community to build together, I use it for my projects too, and even I expect this to become my main project in the future.
