Two requests land in our inbox more than any others. From players: "Can I point this at my own cloud storage instead of your quota?" From creators: "Can I hand a save to my supporters without keeping a spreadsheet of who's paid this month?"
Both are getting a real answer. We're building a Google Drive storage option and a Patreon membership check, and this post is the plan for each — what it does, where it fits, and what's still up in the air. To be upfront: neither has shipped yet. Checkpoint64 is still pre-1.0, so treat everything below as what we're building, not a button you'll find in today's build. Specifics — plan gating, limits, exact wording in the app — can still move before launch.
Bring your own storage: Google Drive
Every plan comes with cloud storage built in — the free plan is a deliberately small 20 MiB, enough for Stardew or a retro library, and it scales up from there. But a 40-hour modded Minecraft world can eat that on its own, and some people would simply rather keep their own bytes in their own account. Fair.
So we're adding bring-your-own storage, starting with Google Drive. Connect your Google account, and Checkpoint64 writes your versioned backups into your Drive instead of ours. The engine doesn't change — only where the files land.
Everything that makes the app the app stays exactly the same:
- Auto-backup every 30 seconds. It still watches the folder, waits for the game to finish writing, and snapshots on its own.
- Only what changed gets sent. The same deduplication — a 500 MB world re-uploads as a few MB after a normal session. Your Drive fills up slowly, not all at once.
- Full version history and one-click restore. Every backup is still a labelled version you can roll back to. The history just lives in your Drive now.
- Co-op locks and the logbook. Lock-and-pass and the shared activity log are unchanged; they're about who can write, not where the bytes sit.
What you get on top is control. Your saves sit in your own Google Drive, in your account, in space you already pay Google nothing extra for — every Google account comes with 15 GB shared across Drive, Gmail, and Photos. It's an off-site copy you can see and hold. If you ever walk away from Checkpoint64, your versions don't walk with us.
The honest limits: it's your storage, so your Drive's free-or-paid space is the ceiling, and Google's own API rate limits apply — this is a good fit for large libraries, less critical for a two-save setup that never troubles the built-in quota. We're starting with Google Drive because it's what people asked for first; other providers depend on how this one lands.
Members-only saves: Patreon
If you make things, you already know the Creators side of Checkpoint64. Pro lets you mint a read-only share code for any save — a challenge seed, your 100% file, a hand-tuned starting world — and hand it to an audience. Fans redeem the code, your world drops into their library, and they can play it but never save over yours. Read-only visitors don't burn a seat, so "as many fans as you like" actually means that. (The community-servers post is the full tour.)
The missing piece has been gating. Plenty of creators want the save to be a member perk, not a free-for-all — and the current answer is to paste the code somewhere only your paying supporters can see and hope it doesn't leak. That's a spreadsheet-and-honour-system problem, and it's exactly what an integration should kill.
So we're wiring in Patreon. Link your campaign once, and you can require a share code's redeemers to be active members — any paid tier, or one specific tier you choose. The flow we're building:
- Check at redeem. When a fan tries to pull your save, Checkpoint64 confirms they're a current member of your campaign before the download starts.
- Lapse-aware. Membership is checked, not granted once and forgotten — if a pledge lapses, a fresh redeem stops working. No manual clean-up, no stale list.
- Still read-only, still seat-free. Nothing about the share itself changes: members download, never overwrite, and never count against your team's seats.
That turns "here's my cursed run" into a genuine tier reward — a monthly showcase world for members, an emulator memory card for your $5 patrons, a guide's exact starting state for the people funding the guide — without you playing bouncer.
Why these two, and why now
They're the same idea pointed in two directions: control. Google Drive is control over where your saves live. Patreon is control over who gets to grab one. Neither touches the parts of the deal we won't move — the free plan stays real and free, Lifetime stays pay-once, and there's still no charge per person.
Both sit on the roadmap after the v1 launch, and playtest folks will be the first to kick the tyres — bringing a real Drive account or a live Patreon campaign to break against is the single most useful thing you can hand us while we build them.
Get on the launch list and we'll tell you the day these land — or grab the early build now and start a version history under your saves today.