Portaler

Portaler was an enjoyable open-source project I developed as a multi-tenant collaborative mapping tool for Albion Online. It enabled guilds to create private maps, simplifying navigation and information sharing in the game. The archived repo can be found here.

The project gained a substantial user base, with 19,000 to 21,000 monthly active unique users, 10-15 million API requests per month, and around 500 server installations for the Discord bot. Discord was used for the base authentication as well as role based authorization guilds would manage for their users since Albion Online did not have a public API. Despite not being my best work code-wise, the app scaled effectively and was easy to maintain, all while running on less than 2GB of memory and minimal processor usage.

Initially an experiment with Redux hooks, Portaler quickly gained traction. Although I set up a Patreon and Ko-Fi for financial support, the contributions barely covered server costs. However, the project's highlight was the incredible community that formed around the app.

Additionally, to help gain traction, I live-streamed some coding sessions and app usage on Twitch. You can find recordings of these streams on YouTube.

Ultimately, I shut down Portaler after running it for over a year, as I stopped playing the game and lost the motivation to update and support the app. The live service was discontinued on December 1, 2021.