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How much does it actually cost to self-host over-the-air (OTA) updates? Especially for an app with many millions of users. It’s a useful number to know if you’ve got a growing Expo Updates bill. This article prices an extreme case of 100 million monthly active users (MAU). Here is the monthly cost of hosting Codemagic Patch on DigitalOcean at a few sizes: You can host Patch on any Linux compatible machine, such as an EC2 on AWS or a machine on Fly.io.

Codemagic Patch ships live updates of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to Capacitor, Ionic, and Cordova-on-Capacitor apps, without a new store binary. Say a checkout button stops working on some Android 15 devices, and the fix turns out to be four lines of TypeScript. In a Capacitor app, those four lines live in the web layer, inside a WebView, nowhere near native code.

If you are a React Native engineer, your job isn’t typically about maintaining infrastructure. So “self-hosted OTA” can sound like a trap. Even if your Expo Update bill is hitting six figures, it’s easy to assume that self-hosting isn’t worth the potentially huge time sink. That fear is understandable, but it doesn’t have to play out that way.

Self-hosting OTA updates became common after App Center and CodePush shut down in 2025. CodePush had been the popular free option, but the remaining hosted services easily hitting five or six figure bills for popular apps. For staging-only or use with small user bases, self-hosting is fairly straight forwards. But, as the user base grows, the architecture can start to struggle and bolt on pieces are required.

React Native OTA tools in 2026 split across two clients, Expo Updates and CodePush-style, and two ways of running them, hosted or self-hosted. The clients are not interchangeable. You still need the matching SDK.

Having maintained a CodePush fork for 18 months and served billions of updates, we decided it was time for an overhaul. We’re big fans of CodePush, and it was a great benefit to the React Native community. But, it was written in 2015 and had some weaknesses. The biggest of these was architectural, with limitations in how update checks and release metadata could scale. The result, Codemagic Patch, is now public and available to self-host.

The React Native New Architecture is no longer optional. From React Native 0.82 onwards it is mandatory, the legacy architecture is gone, and every team still running it is now carrying technical debt that will need to be resolved. For most teams, the migration conversation quickly turns to tooling. Does our CI/CD pipeline still work? Does our crash reporter still integrate correctly? Do our analytics tools need updating?

The ability to push an update directly to your users’ devices without App Store review, without delay, without any action required from the user, is one of the most powerful capabilities available to a React Native team. Over-the-air (OTA) updates change how fast you can respond to bugs, iterate on features, and ship improvements. But that power cuts both ways. A bad OTA update reaching 100% of your users at once is considerably worse than a bad store release.

Every mobile engineering team hits the same wall eventually. A test starts failing — but only sometimes. You re-run the build and it passes. You merge the code. Three days later it fails again. Nobody can reproduce it locally. The test stays red for a week while three engineers waste afternoons chasing it. Then someone adds a comment that says “known flaky, ignore” and that test quietly continues blocking pipelines for the next six months.

Your CI pipeline worked fine when the app was young. Then the app grew. Features got split into modules. Teams formed around those modules. And somewhere along the way, what used to be a 4-minute build became a 25-minute one. Then 35. Now nobody pushes to main before lunch because the queue is already backed up. If this sounds familiar, you are not alone. According to Google’s 2024 Developer Survey, 83% of Android apps over 500,000 lines of code struggle with build performance.