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.

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Jonathan Mensah's blogs

Jonathan Mensah — Building in Publicjmensah.hashnode.dev7 posts

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Recently published

jmensah.hashnode.dev

How I Got to 50,000 Downloads Without Spending on Ads (And What Actually Drove Growth)

In 2021, I built my first mobile app during a high school vacation. It was terrible, basically a wrapper around a website for exam past questions. But it made okay money from ads, so I forgot about it

2d ago10 min read

jmensah.hashnode.dev

How I Built a Multi-App OTA Update System (And Cut Costs from $199/month to $0)

Expo's EAS Update service costs $199/month for 50,000 monthly active users. If you have multiple apps or are a solo dev with modest traffic, that's expensive, even the $19/month tier only covers 3,0

Mar 110 min read

jmensah.hashnode.dev

How I Handle Deployments and CI/CD for a $5/Month Production App

Running a production app with ~10,000 active users on a $5/month VPS sounds impossible. But it's not, if you're smart about your tooling. Here's my entire deployment setup: from code commit to product

Feb 227 min read

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 ...

Feb 156 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 85 min read

Jonathan Mensah

About

Available for

Jonathan Mensah's blogs

Recently published

How I Got to 50,000 Downloads Without Spending on Ads (And What Actually Drove Growth)

How I Built a Multi-App OTA Update System (And Cut Costs from $199/month to $0)

How I Handle Deployments and CI/CD for a $5/Month Production App

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

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

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Jonathan Mensah

About

Available for

Jonathan Mensah's blogs

Recently published

How I Got to 50,000 Downloads Without Spending on Ads (And What Actually Drove Growth)

How I Built a Multi-App OTA Update System (And Cut Costs from $199/month to $0)

How I Handle Deployments and CI/CD for a $5/Month Production App

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

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