A free DeployGate alternative for iOS and Android builds

BetaDrop and DeployGate, free tier against free tier

DeployGate figures are transcribed from their own plan comparison at deploygate.com/pricing, checked August 2026. Their per-file upload ceiling is not published anywhere public, so that row says so instead of carrying a number we guessed. Both products move; read their page before deciding on numbers alone.

Where DeployGate's free plan runs out

Two apps is the first wall, and it arrives early. One iOS app and one Android app is two, so a single product on both platforms fills the free plan on day one. An agency running three clients is out of app slots before it has signed up a second tester, and a second tester is all the free plan has room for anyway.

The 5 GB monthly transfer allowance is the one that catches teams by surprise, because it is spent by your testers rather than by you. A 100 MB Android build downloaded by 20 people is 2 GB. Ship three of those in a month and you are over, and their pricing page states that transfers are suspended when you exceed it.

Nobody plans a release around that number until the day it stops them.

The rest of the free plan is more generous than it first looks: 100 devices per distribution page is plenty for a normal beta round, and 500 revisions per app is not a limit anyone hits by accident. Crash logs are there too, kept for a week. BetaDrop has no crash logs at all, so if that week of retention is doing real work for you, weigh it properly before reading further.

The step up from free costs $150 a month

Flexible is $150 a month for 4 members, then $20 a month for each member after that, to a maximum of 49. Enterprise is a quote, starts at 20 members, and adds SSO, an NDA and annual invoiced billing. There is nothing priced in between.

For a twelve-person mobile team with QA, $150 is a defensible line item. For two contractors and a designer who need a build on a phone this afternoon, it is a question about whether beta distribution gets a budget at all.

BetaDrop's ladder is shaped differently because the product is smaller. The free tier gives you 500 MB per file and 1 GB of storage, with build links that default to 3 days and can be pushed to 7 days. A guest upload, made without signing in at all, lives for 24 hours. The first paid step is Pro at $69 a year, which is mostly about the link outliving the sprint: builds stay reachable for up to a year, and Studio takes that to 10 years while the subscription runs. The full pricing breakdown lists what each tier actually enforces.

Read that as a narrower product rather than a cheaper one. You are not getting DeployGate for less money. You are getting the one part of it most small teams use daily, priced so the free tier stays usable past the second app.

When DeployGate is the better choice

DeployGate is a genuine team platform, not a link generator with a pricing page. Member seats, projects, crash logs, device management and an SDK-based update flow are one product there. If you need per-member access control and crash reporting together, that is a real category and BetaDrop does not compete in it.

Three specifics are worth naming. Offboarding is the first: revoking one member's access to every app at once is a seat model doing its job, and a shareable URL cannot imitate it. The second is their Android SDK, a library you compile into the app, which collects crashes, custom logs and in-app feedback with screenshots. The third is update notifications, pushed to Android testers and emailed to iOS testers when a new revision lands, so nobody has to be told a build is ready.

There is also a straightforward case for staying put: it already works. If you moved to DeployGate during their App Center migration and your CI, your testers and your notification habits have settled around it, nothing on this page is worth an afternoon. The switch is worth considering when you are one or two people, you keep bumping the 2-app ceiling, and $150 a month is not a number you were planning to spend on getting a file onto a phone.

Moving a build off DeployGate

There is no import tool, and you do not need one. Both services take a signed artifact and hand back a URL, so what actually moves is one step at the end of your pipeline. A 50 MB build takes roughly 30 seconds to push up on a 15 Mbps uplink, and the install link exists the moment the upload finishes.

1. Keep the artifact you already build. Nothing on the build side changes: Xcode or Gradle keeps producing the same signed .ipa or .apk, and the DeployGate SDK only needs removing if you were actually using its crash capture and in-app feedback.
2. Drop the file on Upload IPA or Upload APK. Signing in is optional, but it is what lets you choose the expiry per build instead of taking the guest default of 24 hours.
3. Read the parsed metadata before you send anything. BetaDrop pulls the bundle ID, version and build number out of the file and shows them next to the link, which is where you notice you uploaded yesterday's artifact rather than hearing it from a tester.
4. Send the link or the QR code. Testers open it on their phone and install from the browser, with no invitation to accept and no review queue to sit in.
5. Move the upload into CI. Install @betadrop/cli and run betadrop publish, or add the GitHub Action for BetaDrop uploads with a BETADROP_TOKEN secret. Both print the install URL so a bot can post it into the release channel.

npm install -g @betadrop/cli
betadrop login --token bd_live_xxxxxxxx
betadrop publish ./MyApp.apk --name "Sprint 22" --notes "Fixes the sync crash"

iOS signing is unchanged by any of this, on either host. Ad hoc distribution means a build signed to run on a fixed list of devices, and a provisioning profile is the Apple-issued file that carries that list, keyed on each device's UDID, the unique identifier an iPhone reports about itself (25 characters on modern hardware, 40 on older). Miss a UDID and the install fails on that phone no matter who is hosting the file. The UDID checker collects identifiers from testers, the provisioning profile decoder shows which devices a profile already covers, and the IPA inspector reads the signing details straight out of the file before you share it. Export from Xcode with the release-testing method; the old ad-hoc value is rejected outright by Xcode 26.

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