# user accounts, credits and cloud rendering — spoolcast

The pipeline stopped being a program on one Mac. Accounts, a credit ledger, files in cloud storage, and a render queue that survives a restart.

Type: project

Published: 2026-07-31

[Original page](<https://artlu.ai/project/user-accounts-credits-and-cloud-rendering-spoolcast>)

[Browse this group](<https://artlu.ai/ai/groups/spoolcast.md>)

Parent project: spoolcast

Series: features

Recorded status: launched

Updated: 2026-09-16T19:16:22.550Z

Technologies: Python, Docker, Cloudflare R2, Railway, React, TypeScript, Remotion, ffmpeg

## Details

**What is it?**
The month spoolcast turned from tooling one person ran locally into a service other people can sign up to and use.

**What it does**
- Accounts with roles, a way to sign in, and a credit ledger for each user
- Every project file lives in cloud storage instead of on one laptop's disk
- A durable render queue — a job caught mid-render by a restart picks up where it left off instead of dying
- Rendering runs either locally or in the cloud, isolated either way
- An admin dashboard that publishes assets to the shared global library

**How it works**
One module owns the content root and all file access, so every script, drafter, and API route resolves paths the same way — before this, absolute paths were scattered through the codebase and only worked on the machine they were written on. The hosted engine runs in Docker behind a bearer-token gate, with a one-way incremental mirror pushing content to cloud storage under each user's own prefix.

**Correction, 2026-09-16**
This entry first said sign-in was a magic link. That was true on 27 July, when accounts and the credit ledger were built, and Google sign-in was added beside it the same day. It stopped being true on 3 September, when signing in became Google and nothing else — no password, no emailed link. The original wording is left described here rather than quietly swapped out.

**Built with**
Python engine in Docker on Railway, Cloudflare R2 for storage, React + TypeScript front end, Remotion and ffmpeg for render.

## Links

[Site or demo](<https://spoolcast-web.pages.dev/>)

An interactive demo is embedded on the original page.

## Related build notes

[spoolcast stopped being a program on one mac](<https://artlu.ai/ai/log/day-136-spoolcast-stopped-being-a-program-on-one-mac.md>)


Status and dates describe the published record, not a recent test of an external service. Missing details are not inferred. Public links do not imply an open-source licence or permission to reuse material.

[Directory](<https://artlu.ai/llms.txt>)