The client is the Common Interest Community Standards Council (cic-sc.org), a standards and education organization for HOA board members and community association managers. They needed two things in one platform. The public side publishes governance standards, research and a free library. The business side sells and delivers books, courses and exams, and runs member accounts.

I built it in Next.js with Clerk for sign-in, Supabase for data, Stripe for payments and Resend for email. Members get a dashboard with video lessons, module quizzes, a timed final exam drawn from a 200-question pool, certificates, ebooks and receipts. Behind it is an admin back office for members, orders, cohorts, waitlists, support tickets and course access. The site is live and has had 300+ updates since May.

Three problems stood out. First, putting checkout next to the standards made the organization look like a vendor instead of an authority. I split it into a non-commercial standards site and a separate studio where every sale happens, with free sign-up to reach the gated content. Second, paid access had to unlock without anyone stepping in. I connected Stripe's payment notifications so purchases unlock courses and ebooks automatically, refunds take access back, and failures are logged instead of failing silently. Third, deploys were stalling because large media files were being uploaded with every build. Excluding them brought deploys down to about 2 minutes.