Casa Paleologu: a custom course-sales platform, run for years without an IT department

The challenge

Casa Paleologu is not a typical e-commerce client. It is a cultural institution teaching humanities to adults, children, and companies - a Cicero seminar, a rhetoric workshop for teenagers, summer schools, study trips to Barcelona and Nuremberg - with its own publishing house on top. And it sells something that does not fit off-the-shelf shop software: seats in live courses. A course runs in sessions, each with a start date, a venue, a lecturer, a meeting schedule, and a limited number of places. Prices vary by audience and timing - early-bird windows, special rates, corporate enrollments invoiced to a legal entity rather than a person. Alongside the courses sit a scholarship program, a media archive, and a steady stream of marketing campaigns aimed at very different audiences: parents, young people, professionals, HR departments.

A standard webshop plugin cannot model any of that cleanly, and a custom platform from an agency normally comes with an agency-sized price tag - both to build and, more importantly, to keep alive. Casa Paleologu is a nonprofit, not a tech company. It has no internal IT department and no appetite to build one. What it needed was custom software with the running costs of a subscription.

What we built

The platform has two halves, both owned entirely by Casa Paleologu:

A headless backend on Directus - an open-source data platform that gives the organization's staff an admin interface for everything operational: courses, sessions, participants, books, orders, scholarship applications. On top of it sit six custom-built extensions that encode the actual business:

• Course catalog and enrollment APIs, including segment-filtered views for each marketing audience
• Online card payments through Netopia (mobilPay), Romania's leading payment processor, with the full encrypted confirmation handshake
• Automated invoicing through SmartBill: proforma on order, fiscal invoice on payment, including invoices to legal entities with company registration data - no manual bookkeeping step in between
• Participant lists and attendance sheets generated for every session
• Transactional email for the entire lifecycle: enrollment confirmations, payment receipts, password resets, scholarship decisions
• Error monitoring via Sentry, newsletter integration via Mailchimp

A modern storefront on Nuxt 3 and Vue - server-side rendered for SEO, roughly 60 pages: the course catalog with per-audience category pages, a multi-step checkout, the publishing house's bookshop with its own checkout, a customer account area (active and past courses, invoices, feedback, scholarship applications), media and podcast sections, and a series of campaign landing pages translated directly from the designer's Figma files.

When someone enrolls today, the entire chain runs without a human touching it: seat reserved, card charged, fiscal invoice issued, confirmation email sent, name on the participant list. Staff time goes into teaching and curation, not administration.

Built to be affordable, not just to ship

The unusual thing about this engagement is not any single feature - it is the cost profile. The platform has been in production since 2022 and has been operated, extended, and twice substantially reworked by what is effectively a fraction of a developer. Three decisions made that possible:

A deliberately boring tech stack. Directus provides the admin UI, permissions, and data API out of the box, so custom code exists only where the business is genuinely custom - payments, invoicing, enrollment rules. There is simply less software to maintain.

Custom code kept small and replaceable. The six backend extensions and the frontend together are a codebase small enough to hold in your head - around 21,000 lines on the frontend, with the backend extensions encoding business rules rather than infrastructure.

Agentic development for the later phases. The 2024-2026 frontend relaunch was built AI-natively: agent instruction files in every major directory of the repository, and AI agents doing the heavy lifting under review. Campaign landing pages went from Figma file to deployed page in days, each one a single day's commit history. A full account-area overhaul - dashboard, invoices, feedback, scholarships, across frontend and backend - shipped in short, focused bursts rather than a project phase. This is what lets a fractional team keep delivering at a pace the organization's marketing can actually use.

The same approach now extends beyond the codebase: management reporting runs on a live dashboard that reads the platform's own operational data and shows five years of course sales with year-over-year comparisons, broken down by course - built with an AI agent directly against the platform's API, in an afternoon, instead of as a reporting project.

The relaunch

In late 2024 the original storefront, built in 2022, was due for replacement: the organization wanted faster pages, better search visibility, proper analytics, and a design refresh driven by new brand work. Rather than a rewrite project with a budget to match, the new storefront was built alongside the running one and switched over page by page: Nuxt 3 with TypeScript, server-side rendering, structured Google Analytics 4 tracking of the entire funnel from course view to purchase, Meta pixel for campaigns, automated sitemaps, and the per-audience landing pages the marketing team had never had room for before.

The backend kept running untouched throughout - the same Directus instance, the same payment and invoicing extensions, four years of operational data intact.

Why a long-term fractional partnership works

Small organizations are usually offered two bad options: rent generic SaaS that does not fit the business, or commission custom software they cannot afford to maintain once the agency leaves. The third option is the one this engagement demonstrates - custom software designed from day one to be operated by a fractional team, on a boring tech stack, with agentic development multiplying what that fraction of a person can deliver. The result behaves like an internal platform team, at a cost a nonprofit can carry year after year.