Th3Circle: A Live Creator Subscription Platform

What it is

Th3Circle is a platform where independent creators run their own portal, collect emails, sell directly, and take payments from the people who already follow them. Every creator is a tenant. It is live, it has real users, and it moves real money.

I designed it, built it, and I still operate it. There is no team behind this one. That matters for how it was built, because every decision had to be one person could maintain at 2am.

Payments

Stripe does checkout, subscriptions, and Connect payouts so creators get paid directly. The part that took the most care was not the happy path, it was everything after it.

Webhooks are recorded by the provider's event id, so a redelivered event cannot grant a second entitlement. Payment providers retry by design and will resend anything they cannot confirm, including a request that succeeded but timed out on the way back. Duplicate delivery is an expected condition, not an exceptional one, and a billing system that treats it as exceptional will eventually double-charge someone.

Fulfillment runs on serverless functions triggered by those webhooks, so entitlement changes are driven by what the payment provider confirms rather than what the browser claims.

Data and access

The schema is Postgres on Supabase with row-level security on every tenant-scoped table, and FORCE ROW LEVEL SECURITY enabled so the table owner is not silently exempt from its own policies.

Auth is passwordless one-time codes. No password storage, no reset flow to get wrong, and one less category of support request.

This is also where I found the most interesting bug of the project. Row-level security scopes rows but says nothing about columns, which meant a tenant could pass every policy I had written and still upgrade their own plan for free. I wrote that up separately, along with the layered fix and the fifteen tests that keep it closed.

Everything else that makes it a product

An automated campaign pipeline sends launch emails on signup, runs cron-scheduled follow-ups with paced bulk sending so a provider does not throttle the whole run, and delivers rewards when a pledge clears.

There is a Twilio SMS broadcast system for creators who reach people that way, and the whole thing ships as a PWA with silent service-worker updates, so a creator on a phone gets the new version without being asked to reinstall anything.

Deployment is CI/CD to Netlify. Push, build, live.

What I would tell a client about this

The reason this project is worth reading is not the feature list. It is that one person carried it from an empty schema to a system that handles other people's money, and the boring parts got the same attention as the visible ones.

Idempotent webhooks, database-enforced authorization, and paced sending are not things you notice when they work. They are the things that decide whether a product survives contact with real users, and they are the parts I take seriously.