Full-Stack Developer — Build an Online Academy Platform (Live Classes, Payments, Counseling)

Category: Web Development → Full-Stack Development Project type: Fixed price — 350$ Duration: ~1.5 months from kickoff to launch Experience level: Expert About us We run an online academy that teaches live, scheduled classes to school-age students. Families pay us a monthly subscription. Students attend real classes with a real teacher on video, they get worksheets and grades, they download materials, and they get guidance from a counselor along the way. All of that currently runs on spreadsheets, manual invoices, and meeting links pasted into emails. Our catalog is in one spreadsheet, our timetable in another, and attendance is whatever a teacher remembers to write down afterwards. When a parent asks whether their child actually turned up to class last month, we go digging. It works, barely, and it stops working the moment we grow. We're replacing all of it with one platform. What we need built Four kinds of people use it, and each needs a different platform when they log in. Students find our programs, subscribe and pay, attend their live classes, submit worksheets, download materials, see their grades and their timetable, and book time with their counselor. Teachers are invited in by us, run their classes, grade the work waiting for them, and share resources with their students. Counselors meet students one-to-one, keep their own calendar, and keep private notes on the students they work with. Admins — our staff — run the whole operation from one place: the catalog, the timetable, enrollments, payments, students, teachers, counselors, and the reports we answer parents with. The parts that matter most to us Signing up and paying. Families subscribe monthly through Stripe, and access follows payment automatically without anyone on our team touching it — including renewals, failed cards, and cancellations. Some of our families pay by cash or transfer instead, so our admins also need to enroll someone manually and have it behave exactly like any other enrollment. The timetable. Our admins schedule classes, including repeating ones — someone non-technical needs to be able to say "every Tuesday and Thursday until the end of June" without reading a manual, then move or cancel a single week of it later. Everyone sees their own schedule at the correct time for wherever they are. Live classes, on Jitsi, with a shared whiteboard. A student clicks one button and is in their classroom — no meeting links, no passwords, no way to end up in a class they don't belong to. Teachers need a whiteboard they can actually teach on: draw, write, share it with the class, and keep what was on it. We're self-hosting Jitsi and the whiteboard on a Microsoft Azure virtual machine, so setting that server up, securing it, and integrating it cleanly into the platform is part of this job. (The platform itself doesn't have to live there — hosting for the app is your call, and we'll agree it with you.) Attendance, recorded by itself. Who joined the class is who attended. No registers, no one filling anything in afterwards. Worksheets and materials. Two kinds of worksheet: one the platform scores automatically, one the student uploads for a teacher to mark and give feedback on. Teachers also upload resources for students to download. Uploads have to be dependable — a student re-sending homework three times is a support ticket for us. Counseling. Students are assigned a counselor, book private sessions with them, and meet in a private video room only those two can enter. Counselors keep notes that admins can see and teachers and other students cannot. These are records about children, so who can see what needs to be obviously right, not nearly right. Not in this project Certificates and in-app notifications. You'll see them in the menus and mock screens — leave them there and don't build them. They're the phase after this. What you'd own The whole thing, from the requirements we hand you through to a working platform our staff can use. We've specced the product, finalized the database design, made the architecture decisions, and written the backlog in Jira — so you're not starting from a blank page. But how it gets built is your call. We don't want to be consulted on every technical decision, and we're not going to hand you a design and ask you to wire it up. We describe what the product needs to do; you decide how, and you tell us when we've asked for something that isn't worth what it costs. That includes getting it live: the Azure server for video and whiteboard, hosting for the platform, environments, backups, and enough documentation that we're not stranded after you've gone. Built with: Next.js and TypeScript, PostgreSQL on Neon with Prisma, Stripe subscriptions, self-hosted Jitsi with a whiteboard on Azure, Resend for email, Jira for tracking. If you'd choose differently on something, tell us why — we'll listen, we just won't rebuild the schema. How we'll work together We're the client, not your project manager. What we want is a short written update twice a week — what shipped, what's at risk, what needs a decision from us — and something we can click through as it comes together. We'd far rather cut a feature in week two than discover a problem in week six. Who we're looking for A senior full-stack developer who's shipped whole products, not just features Real experience taking payments — subscriptions specifically, not one-off charges. This is our revenue. You've built something schedule-shaped before: a booking system, a calendar, a timetable. If you know why time zones and repeating events are painful, say so. Comfortable standing up and securing a Linux server, and handing it over documented. Self-hosted Jitsi or similar video experience is a strong plus. It has to work properly on a phone — a lot of our parents only ever use one Experience with education, kids, or anything involving private records about people is a real plus Direct communicator. If something's a bad idea, we want to hear it in week one. Probably not a fit if you need to be managed, if you go quiet for days at a time, or if you'd rather build something clever than something finished. There are also no finished designs — you'll work from the spec and a component library, so we need reasonable taste, not just technical skill. To apply Please don't send a template cover letter; we can tell, and we skip them. Tell us instead: A product you built that took recurring payments. What went wrong with billing, and did you find out before or after a customer told you? Show us a scheduling, booking, or calendar feature you've built. How did you let an ordinary person set up a repeating event without confusing them? Have you self-hosted video before? What broke, and what would you do differently? Looking at everything above — what's the part we're most likely underestimating? Your honest availability over the next six weeks, and whether you'd be taking other work alongside this. Include one link to something live that you built. We'd rather use it than read about it.