Tech stack and some honest tradeoffs I made building a solo Chrome extension

Since some of you here are builders too — here's what's under

the hood and why:

Stack:

- Chrome MV3 (had to. MV2 is end-of-life)

- Cloudflare Workers for the API

- D1 for user state and usage metering

- R2 for private media storage

- Signed URLs for media delivery (no public CDN links)

The media architecture was the hardest part. I wanted scenes

and music to be private (no hotlinking, no scraping) but still

fast. Ended up with a token + proxy approach: the extension

requests a short-lived signed URL, then streams through

Cloudflare's edge.

Tradeoffs I made:

- Client-side session state (not server-side) — simpler, but

no cross-device sync yet

- Usage quota for Free tier (time-based, not feature-based) —

lets everyone access all content, just limits heavy usage

- Chrome-only for now — I wanted to do one platform right first

Happy to go deep on any of this if curious.