Creator and fan subscription platform

Context

A startup building a platform where creators sell subscriptions and talk to their audience directly. Three roles — creator, fan, and admin — each with a different set of permissions, navigation and data.

Client and product details are withheld here; I do not have written permission to name them.

The hard problem

The backend was being written at the same time as the frontend. Endpoints changed shape mid-build and some did not exist when the screens that needed them were due.

On top of that, access control was not a logged-in-or-not question. A page could depend on sign-in status, email verification, subscription state and role at the same time, and those conditions changed independently of each other.

What I did

Put the API behind one layer. Token refresh, error normalisation and request handling lived in a single place, so a change in an endpoint's shape was a change in one file rather than across every screen calling it.

Made route guards composable. Rather than one guard checking everything, each condition — authenticated, verified, subscribed, correct role — was separate and combined per route. New routes declared what they required instead of repeating the logic.

Built the Stripe subscription flow end to end: plan selection, Stripe Elements checkout, webhook-driven status changes, grace periods, cancellation and re-subscription. The awkward part is that Stripe confirms asynchronously, so the interface has to stay honest about state it does not know yet.

Added Google and Apple OAuth behind one provider-agnostic interface, so a third provider would be configuration rather than new code.

Built real-time chat over WebSockets, with reconnection that recovers missed messages — the users were on mobile connections that drop.

Outcome

The platform shipped with all three roles working, and the frontend stayed buildable while the API underneath it was still moving.

Stack

Vue 3, TypeScript, Pinia, Ant Design Vue, Stripe, Google and Apple OAuth, WebSockets.