CreativeOS

Freelancers and small creative studios in Nigeria run their businesses across WhatsApp, spreadsheets, and screenshots. Proposals get lost in chat, approvals are verbal (and unenforceable), and invoicing is manual — with no clean paper trail when a client disputes a deliverable or a payment.

The tools that solve this abroad (HoneyBook, Bonsai, Dubsado) assume US/EU payment rails, tax rules, and a client who will happily create an account. None of that fits the Nigerian market.

Clients won't sign up. Any approval flow that requires the client to create an account dies on arrival — the whole flow had to work with zero client login while still producing a legally meaningful record.

Money is local. Invoicing had to speak naira, VAT and TIN, and settle through Paystack with bank verification — not Stripe.

Multi-tenant from day one. Every studio's data must be strictly isolated, enforced at the database layer, not just in application code.

The core is a single client workflow — Proposal → Approval → Invoice → Paid — modelled as explicit states so the whole business pipeline is queryable and auditable.

Client approval happens on a no-login, WhatsApp-first page: the client opens a link, reviews, and approves. Each action is captured with a timestamped audit trail, giving the studio a defensible record without ever asking the client to register.

Multi-tenancy is enforced with row-level security in Postgres (Neon) via Drizzle, so isolation is guaranteed by the database rather than trusted to every query. Auth is handled by BetterAuth, background/rate-limit state by Upstash Redis, file storage by S3, transactional email by Resend, and payments/bank verification by Paystack. The app ships as a PWA so studios can use it like a native app on cheap Android hardware.

No-login approval means I traded classic account-based identity for a link-plus-audit-trail model. That required careful thought about link security and non-repudiation, but it was the only design the market would actually adopt.

Row-level security adds complexity to every migration and query path, and makes some queries harder to write — accepted deliberately, because a single cross-tenant data leak would be fatal for a multi-studio product.

Building on Paystack (not Stripe) narrows the platform to Nigeria for now, but that focus is the product's entire reason to exist.

CreativeOS is my most active project (~538 commits) and is in active development with a working live demo. It's the piece I'm proudest of — it's not a clone of an existing app, it's a product designed around a market that the existing tools ignore.