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Jonathan Mensah (@jonathan-m) | Hashnode

@jonathan-m

Jonathan Mensah

@jonathan-m

A CS Stdent in Ghana building and shipping software

Joined December 2025

About

Shipping software to real users. Writing about production lessons, expensive mistakes, and what breaks after 1,000 downloads.

Jonathan Mensah's blogs

Jonathan Mensah — Building in Publicjmensah.hashnode.dev4 posts

About

Shipping software to real users. Writing about production lessons, expensive mistakes, and what breaks after 1,000 downloads.

Jonathan Mensah's blogs

Jonathan Mensah — Building in Publicjmensah.hashnode.dev4 posts

Recently published

jmensah.hashnode.dev

How I Migrated 50,000 Users from Firebase to a Custom Backend (And What Broke Anyway)

After my Firebase bill hit $300/month, I knew I had to migrate. But I had a problem: 50,000 downloads, ~10,000 active users, and zero tolerance for downtime or forcing password resets. Here's how I migrated from Firebase to a custom NestJS + MongoDB ...

4d ago·6 min read

jmensah.hashnode.dev

How My Firebase Bill Hit $300 in One Month (And Why I Don't Use Firebase Anymore)

I randomly checked my Firebase dashboard one day and my heart sank. $300. In one month. For an app I thought was "basically free to run." Turns out "free tier" doesn't mean much when you're making inefficient queries to thousands of active users. Her...

Feb 8·5 min read

jmensah.hashnode.dev

Why My App Crashed 47 Times in One Week (And the Monitoring Tool That Would've Saved Me)

47 crashes in one week. That's what happens when you ship an app to 50,000 users without proper error monitoring. My app's rating started tanking. Users were leaving one-star reviews. And I had no idea what was actually causing it. The Play Console c...

Jan 31·4 min read

jmensah.hashnode.dev

Building in Public as a CS Student (After a Year in Production)

My app crashed 47 times in one week. That same month, my Firebase bill hit $300 because I didn't understand read/write pricing. By that point, the app had been live for nearly a year and reached 50,000 downloads, which meant every mistake was expensi...

Dec 24, 2025·1 min read