user accounts, credits and cloud rendering — spoolcast

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.