Roots: see your haircut before you sit down

Concept project. Roots is a fictional family salon in Riga, built in three days for the Base44 Challenge. No real client is involved.

A salon's real problem is not booking. It is that the person in the chair does not know what they want, and the stylist finds out four minutes in, scissors already moving.

So the page shows you first. Pick one of nine cuts, upload one photo, and 13 seconds later you are looking at yourself wearing it. Booking is the last step, not the first.

What is actually running underneath

The page never calls the image model. Every request that costs money or sends a message goes through n8n, which holds the keys and enforces the caps: two tries per session, 25 a day, 250 total. When the ceiling is reached, the page shows a real prepared result instead of an error, because the person who hits that moment is judging the product, not the budget.

The automation is a chain, not one trick. Photo plus chosen cut becomes a result through fal.ai Nano Banana. The result buys a contact: you want the picture, the salon wants an email. The contact attaches the picture to a booking, so the stylist sees it before the person sits down. Three weeks later the same workflow emails the person their own photo with one line: your roots are showing. Then it deletes both pictures.

That last step is why storage moved to an EU bucket mid build. The first choice could not delete files at all, and a page should not promise what its storage cannot do.

Decisions worth naming

Two cards side by side, not a before and after slider. The model reframes the photo and turns the head slightly, so a slider would read as a defect. Two cards turn the same behaviour into a salon portfolio.

The waiting screen is not a spinner. The generation takes about 13 seconds, and waiting is normal in a salon, so the screen shows the person their own photo with a slow sweep of light and three short lines.

A voice assistant answers from the page itself and books into the same calendar. It says it is an AI in its first sentence.

Stack

Base44 for the page and the data, n8n for the whole chain, fal.ai Nano Banana for the image work, Supabase in Frankfurt for the uploaded photos, Vapi for the voice assistant, Gmail for the mail.

Live: https://roots-salon.base44.app