Paywat case study — Rushan Edirisuriya

The brief

A payments platform clearing six figures of transactions a month cannot treat a failed payment as an edge case. The goal was a platform that stays up and recovers gracefully when a gateway does not.

Paywat parent portal School Store on desktop, showing a cart total, student filters and product cards for a hoodie, a field trip ticket and concert seating — The parent portal on desktop: shop, pay and stay informed in one place.

Paywat parent portal Feed and Community Updates on desktop, with an action-required payment card, upcoming dates and student meal balances — The parent portal on desktop: shop, pay and stay informed in one place.

The approach

Node microservices on AWS, with queues (SQS) between services so work is retried safely instead of lost. Gateway handling and retry logic were optimised against real failure patterns, and the React front end was kept honest about payment state at every step.

Paywat mobile feed with class stories, a zoo trip payment card and a school announcement — The same experience on mobile, built for paying in a few taps.

Paywat mobile School Store with search, category chips and product cards — The same experience on mobile, built for paying in a few taps.

ReactNodeMicroservicesAWSSQS

Reference architecture

How the platform fits together: clients behind an edge and identity layer, independently deployable Node.js services, an event backbone with an outbox and retries, and service-owned PostgreSQL databases, with card payments handled by an external compliant provider.

Paywat platform architecture diagram showing clients, AWS edge and identity, EKS microservices, an asynchronous event backbone, service-owned databases, external providers, and a wallet top-up and payment example — Architecture overview. Open full size

What I owned

React front end and Node microservices, end to end
Gateway integration and retry optimisation
Queue-driven processing on AWS SQS
Reliability work behind a 99.9% uptime record

The result

Volume 100K+/mo

Uptime 99.9%

Payment success +15%

Paywat

The brief

The approach

What I owned

The result

Blockchain-Based Rewards Platform

Tell me what you’re building.