NeoCast

A screen recording & video sharing platform built on a fully free stack.

Stack

• Next.js 15 (App Router, Server Actions)
• Neon — serverless Postgres (free 0.5 GB)
• Drizzle ORM
• Cloudflare R2 — S3-compatible object storage (free 10 GB, zero egress)
• Groq Whisper — AI transcription (free tier, VTT output)
• Better Auth — Google OAuth
• Arcjet — rate limiting & bot protection (free tier)
• Tailwind CSS v4

Features

• Screen recording (capped at 2 minutes, 720p, ~1.2 Mbps) — keeps R2 usage low
• Direct browser → R2 upload via presigned URLs (server never touches the video bytes)
• Native <video> playback (no third-party iframe)
• AI transcripts via Groq whisper-large-v3, stored as VTT in Postgres
• Public/private visibility, view counts, search, sort

Setup

1. Copy .env.example to .env and fill in credentials.
2. Create the resources:
   • Neon: create a project, copy the connection string into DATABASE_URL.
   • Cloudflare R2: create a bucket, create an API token with R2 read/write, enable public access on the bucket (or attach a custom domain). Copy the r2.dev URL into R2_PUBLIC_BASE_URL.
   • Groq: create an API key at https://console.groq.com.
   • Google OAuth: create credentials at https://console.cloud.google.com.
3. Install + push schema:

   npm install
   npm run db:push
   npm run dev

Deploy

• Frontend: Cloudflare Pages via @opennextjs/cloudflare (or Vercel Hobby).
• R2 CORS: in your R2 bucket settings, allow PUT from your deployed origin so the direct browser upload works.

Free-tier capacity (rough)

Resource	Free limit	At 720p ~15MB/clip
R2 storage	10 GB	~650 clips
Neon Postgres	0.5 GB	tens of thousands of rows
Groq transcription	generous req/day	hundreds of clips/day