Self-hosting overview

CaptureFlow's backend is designed to run on your own Cloudflare account. One unified Worker serves the dashboard, auth, the recording viewer, the screenshot viewer, and all API routes, backed by a single D1 database and a single R2 bucket.

TIP

Almost everything is optional. Recording, sharing, the dashboard, and storage quotas all work with just auth configured — email is not required.

What you're deploying

Piece	Tech
Web app (apps/web)	Next.js 16, built for Workers via OpenNext
Database	Cloudflare D1 (captureflow)
Object storage	Cloudflare R2 (captureflow-recordings)
Auth	Better Auth (session secret)
Scheduled jobs	Cron Triggers (hourly multipart GC + daily retention sweep)
Email (optional)	Resend (workspace invites)

The custom worker.ts wraps OpenNext's fetch handler and adds the scheduled() cron handlers.

Prerequisites

• A Cloudflare account with Workers + D1 + R2 enabled. (R2 requires a card on file even on the free tier.)
• A domain you control. The defaults assume captureflow.dev; you can use any domain by editing apps/web/wrangler.jsonc.
• Node 24+ and pnpm 10 (packageManager pins pnpm@10.30.0).
• openssl for generating the auth secret (preinstalled on macOS/Linux).

Install workspace dependencies from the repo root:

pnpm install

All deploy commands target the web app via pnpm --filter @captureflow/web, and use the workspace-local copy of Wrangler — no global install needed.

Cost expectations

The free tiers go a long way, but note these are per Cloudflare account, not per domain:

• R2: 10 GB storage free, then usage-based.
• D1: 5 GB storage free, plus daily read/write row limits.
• Workers: 100k requests/day free.

For a video-heavy workload you'll typically hit R2 storage and operation limits before anything else. See Storage & limits.

Next steps

1. Deploy to Cloudflare — the ordered runbook.
2. Configuration & env — every variable explained.
3. Point the desktop app at your backend.