AFM Aero — Aviation Market Intelligence Platform

Overview

AFM Aero is a B2B SaaS for the aviation industry — a market intelligence portal for pilot training, a curated supplier directory, an industry-update feed, ad placement inventory, and tiered corporate subscriptions billed through both Stripe and PayPal. The product is split into a Next.js 15 / T3 frontend and a Strapi 5 headless backend on MySQL.

I owned the platform end-to-end: payment integrations (dual PSP), invoice generation, the Strapi data model spanning ~40 content APIs, marketing automation via Mailchimp, and the customer-facing onboarding + dashboard flows.

Architecture

┌──────────────────────────────────┐    ┌──────────────────────────────────┐
│  afm-nextjs (Frontend)           │    │  Strapiback (Backend)            │
│  Next.js 15 + React 19 + TS      │    │  Strapi 5 on Koa                 │
│  Tailwind 4 · T3 env validation  │◀──▶│  MySQL · Nodemailer · JWT        │
│  PayPal + Stripe checkout        │    │  Stripe · PayPal webhooks        │
│  Mailchimp · reCAPTCHA · jsPDF   │    │  bcryptjs · slugify              │
└──────────────────────────────────┘    └──────────────────────────────────┘

Frontend routes (afm-nextjs)

A real-world product surface, not a marketing brochure:

• Public — about-us, contact-us, advertise-with-us, pilot-training-market-intelligence, terms-and-conditions-privacy-policy, guide-to-using-afm, topics-of-interest, [permalink] (CMS-driven slugs).
• Marketplace — market-place, suppliers.
• Subscriptions & checkout — corporate-monthly, corporate-annually, subscriptions, payment.
• Auth — login, forgot-password, reset-password, onboarding.
• Authenticated — dashboard, dashboard-sim.
• SEO / infra — dynamic sitemap.ts, robots.ts, opengraph-image.png.

Strapi APIs (Strapiback)

The CMS exposes ~40 collection types covering the entire business:

Highlights

Dual-PSP Checkout

The product accepts both PayPal (@paypal/react-paypal-js) and Stripe for corporate subscriptions. The frontend renders the user's preferred provider; the backend captures both flows in a unified payment / invoice model so reporting and license issuance don't care which rail the money came in on. PayPal IPN/webhooks land at /api/paypal-webhook and Stripe at /api/stripe-checkout.

License Issuance

Three license types — master, corporate (monthly / annually), and complimentary — are minted on payment success and tied to seats inside an organization-name. subscription-actions handles renewals, cancellations, and seat resizing without re-entering checkout.

PDF Invoicing

Invoices are generated client-side with jsPDF, signed against the server-issued invoice record, and downloadable from the dashboard. Keeping rendering on the client kept the Strapi pod stateless and avoided shipping a PDF runtime to the backend.

Marketing & Onboarding

Mailchimp Marketing API drives newsletter sign-ups and segmented industry-update digests. Onboarding captures topics-of-interest and organization metadata to seed personalized supplier and industry-update feeds. Public forms use Google reCAPTCHA v2 to keep the spam off contact and "advertise-with-us".

Content-Driven SEO

A [permalink] catch-all route resolves CMS-managed slugs against Strapi, so the editorial team can publish landing pages, partner microsites, and topic hubs without a frontend deploy. Sitemap and OG images are generated on demand via Next.js metadata routes.

Type-safe Env

The frontend uses @t3-oss/env-nextjs + Zod to validate every env var at build time — Stripe keys, PayPal client IDs, Mailchimp API keys, reCAPTCHA secrets — so a misconfigured deploy fails at the build step instead of leaking into runtime.

Tech Stack