Elundus Core started out as a project for me to test out some donation messages for xQc, using the StreamElements API. Keep this in mind, this is important for later.

I decided make it public and host it as a website, mainly because of the low costs. Back then it was just a static website built with GatsbyJS, so it didn't cost much for me to host it and it was worth it. I wanted to perfect the website, so I've strived to get a high as possible score in Google Lighthouse and made sure to get SEO right, so the website would show up in Google.

After few months of having around 10-15 users a day, the website was featured in a Reddit post. I think it was on r/LiveStreamFails or r/xqcow, but I'm not sure. After that I saw that the amount of visitors was climbing rapidly and with that, the site ranked higher and higher in Google.

Fast-forward to July 17th, 2021. Apparently the website caused so much traffic for StreamElements that they decided to implement security measures. They added a captcha to their API, so it was impossible for the website to convert the TTS messages. I've thought of using a service that solves captchas (paid), but decided it was too expensive.

I've tinkered around with this for a few days until I stumbled upon the Streamlabs API. It does basically the same, but it couldn't be called directly from a website, there had to be a server inbetween. For the developers around: they protected the API with CORS. So I had to host a simple webserver/API that the website could call and everything was fine. Atleast I thought it was.

Apparently the Streamlabs API had a rate limit. Meaning you could only do 20 calls before you'd have to wait to do more calls. That wouldn't work since the website on it's peak had 35-40 TTS submits a minute and would cause an inconsistent user experience.

I've then decided this had to be fixed and created a proxy server system in order to prevent rate-limiting to occur. The website still calls 1 API, but the API then calls one of the proxy servers (and kept track of which one was rate-limited and which wasn't), and the proxy server in turn calls the Streamlabs API to convert the message.

This setup still works to this day, but having to host more and more proxies as the popularity increases is not a working solution for me. I've had the idea for a few months now, but finally made a desktop application for Elundus Core which comes with it's own bundled API which calls Streamlabs, which means I don't have to host an API or proxyservers anymore.

There are many phones around with operating systems and different browsers. It's hard to make a working website and continue developing features tested for all devices, that's why I converted the website to a desktop only app.