Ugh, okay. So I\’m knee-deep in this side project again – some community app thing I\’ve been tinkering with for months between laundry cycles and pretending to adult. Needed invitation tokens, obviously. Not the fancy paid API kind because my budget\’s tighter than my jeans after Thanksgiving dinner. Started googling \”free token generators\” like some digital panhandler. First three tutorials might as well have been hieroglyphics. Remember that one Medium article? Guy wrote 2000 words about cryptographic principles before casually mentioning his \”simple solution\” required a $200/month AWS setup. Closed that tab so fast I nearly cracked my screen.
Then there was the GitHub repo promising \”one-click token generation.\” Downloaded it, ran npm install, got 47 vulnerability warnings. Spent three hours updating dependencies just to watch it fail spectacularly with some obscure buffer allocation error. Sat there at 2AM with cold coffee, staring at terminal vomit. Felt like the code equivalent of assembling IKEA furniture with missing screws and pictograms drawn by a drunk pigeon. Why does everything assume you\’re some cloud architect with a corporate card?
Actually got something working eventually with Node\’s crypto module. Not glamorous. Just this clunky little function that barfs out random strings when you poke it. But here\’s the kicker – tokens kept colliding during testing. Like two users getting identical invites. Statistically improbable? Tell that to Karen from beta testing who emailed me ALL CAPS RANTS about \”UNPROFESSIONAL SECURITY RISKS.\” Turns out Math.random() isn\’t actually random enough for serious stuff. Who knew? (Besides every CS student ever, apparently.) Switched to crypto.randomBytes() like I should\’ve from day one. Felt stupid for missing that.
Deployed it to Heroku\’s free tier. Worked for a week. Then started timing out. Heroku\’s free dynos sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity – woke up to 400 failed token requests in my logs. Users saw spinning wheels instead of invites. One guy tweeted screenshots calling my app \”amateur hour.\” Deleted my angry draft reply because professionalism or whatever. Migrated to serverless functions instead. Cold starts made tokens take 8 seconds to generate. Eight seconds! That\’s three existential crises in internet time. Watched analytics drop like stones in a pond.
Found this obscure library called JWT Simple. Looked promising until I realized it needed secret management. Where do you even put secrets for free? Hardcoded them like an idiot at first (\”What could go wrong?\” – famous last words). Woke up sweating at 3AM remembering that public GitHub repo. Spent dawn hours rotating keys, revoking tokens, emailing apologies to early adopters. My cat judged me hard from the windowsill.
Tried Firebase\’s free plan next. Their auth system generates tokens automatically – beautiful! Until I needed custom claims. Their docs read like modernist poetry: vaguely profound but useless for actual implementation. StackOverflow threads contradicting each other. Burned a weekend making tokens that… expired instantly. Or never expired. Or granted admin rights to test accounts. One test user accidentally deleted a production dataset because my \”isAdmin\” flag stuck like gum on a shoe. Made backup restoration my new meditation practice.
Currently using a duct-tape solution: Cloudflare Workers with Web Crypto API. Free tier handles my paltry traffic. Tokens expire properly (mostly). But now I\’m paranoid about brute-forcing. Added rate-limiting that sometimes blocks legitimate users. Got a support ticket yesterday: \”Your invite system broke when I used VPN??\” Sigh. Maybe I\’ll rewrite it in Rust next weekend. Or maybe I\’ll stare at the wall and question life choices instead.
What grinds my gears? Every \”free\” solution comes with hidden taxes. Time taxes. Complexity taxes. The tax of realizing you\’ve spent 11 hours debugging something that should\’ve taken twenty minutes. Saw some influencer tweet \”Just use Auth0\’s free tier!\” last week. Tried it. Their \”generous\” free plan allows… 7,000 active users total. My mom\’s book club has more members than that. Deleted my account before the rage-tweeting commenced.
So yeah. My tokens work now. Mostly. They\’re ugly hexadecimal strings that smell faintly of desperation and caffeine. But they\’re free. And mine. And honestly? That counts for something in this subscription-everything nightmare we\’re living through. Might refactor it next quarter. Or might not. Depends if the current setup survives the next user surge without lighting my digital house on fire.
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