Success Story
Picstar – SaaS Platform for Photography Contests

01 
Challenge

Photography associations typically manage contests using fragmented tools and manual workflows:

• External submission forms.
• Unstructured voting.
• Manual participant management.
• Non-integrated payments.
• Limited scalability for public contests.

The challenge was to build a complete vertical SaaS platform capable of:

• Supporting association creation.
• Managing public and private contests.
• Manage registrations and participants.
• Handling structured photo submissions.
• Providing configurable and auditable voting systems.
• Integrating secure online payments.
• Scaling seamlessly under high participation.

It was not just about developing a website, but building a complete vertical SaaS for photographic communities.

03 
Solución

Picstar was designed and developed end-to-end as a cloud-native multi-tenant SaaS platform.

The project covered:

• Product conceptualization.
• Full UX/UI design in Figma.
• Multi-tenant architecture definition.
• Frontend development.
• Serverless backend.
• Relational database modeling.
• Stripe payment integration.
• Cloud infrastructure setup.
• Automated CI/CD pipelines.
• Production deployment.

The platform enables:

• Independent association creation.
• Full contest lifecycle management.
• Structured photo uploads.
• Configurable voting systems.
• Jury and participant management.
• Automated administrative workflows
• Secure registration fee payments.

Everything in a unified, secure and scalable environment.

03
Architecture

FRONTEND

• Next.js.
• Performance-optimized architecture.
• App-like user experience.
• SEO-ready.

BACKEND

• Serverless architecture.
• Decoupled APIs.
• Automatic scaling.

DATABASE

• Serverless PostgreSQL with NeonDB.

• Structured relational model for: Associations, Contests, Photos, Users, Voting processes, Payments

PostgreSQL ensured:

• Transactional integrity during voting.
• Secure result handling.
• Support for complex configurable rules.

INFRASTRUCTURE

• Amazon Amplify.
• On-demand AWS cloud.
• Automated CI/CD pipelines.

  PAYMENTS  

• Stripe integration.
• Secure fee collection.
• Compliance-ready setup.