Case study
Inspired Threads
A direct-to-consumer streetwear storefront that looks like a simple static site and, underneath, does the same live-inventory and real-time work most sites reach for a framework to handle.
Not a typical CRUD site
There's no framework and no build step anywhere in this project — every line of frontend code is custom-coded HTML, CSS, and vanilla JS. What makes it worth a closer look is everything that's still running underneath that simplicity.
The honest pitch: no framework, still handles live inventory, real-time chat, and a full admin panel — built custom instead of paved over by a framework's defaults. That's the part of this project that's actually hard.
A production lesson: Stripe caps how much metadata a single checkout session can carry, and an early version of this project quietly hit that ceiling on an unusually large real cart during a live sale — the kind of limit that never shows up in normal testing. The fix was consolidating that data into a far more compact shape rather than papering over it with an arbitrary cart-size cap.
How a request flows through it
A simplified path for a checkout, showing where each piece of the stack does its job.
Browser → Vercel serverless function (api/*.js)
├─→ Supabase / Postgres · product & purchase records
├─→ Upstash Redis · live stock check, prevents oversell
├─→ Stripe · payment & checkout session
└─→ Supabase Realtime · pushes chat updates to signed-in shoppers