What we understand you are building
AstroLaabh sits in a category where the product is genuinely believed in and almost never verifiable. Someone is told which stone will help them, they pay a significant amount for it, and they have no way of knowing whether the stone is what they were told it was, where it came from, or whether anyone treated it with the care the recommendation implied.
Closing that gap is the whole brand. It is why there are two certificates rather than one, why the energisation is streamed to the person who paid for it instead of merely promised, why the origin of a stone is a story you tell rather than a line in a spec, and why care continues after delivery. Anuj's sourcing lineage and gemological training are what make those claims true; the platform's job is to make them visible.
That framing changes what we build. A normal store shows a product and takes a payment. This one has to carry proof alongside every stone, hold a customer's trust through a purchase they are making on faith, and keep an expert in the loop rather than designing them out of it. The sections below are organised around that, not around a feature list.
What gets built
Three connected surfaces, one system underneath, so a customer is the same person whether they arrive through the website, a consultation, or WhatsApp.
The storefront
Where customers browse stones, understand what they are looking at, book a consultation, and buy. Mobile-first, and installable to a phone home screen.
The operations portal
One place your team runs the business. Four separate views for operations, sales, affiliate astrologers, and your in-house gemologists, each seeing only their own work.
Order and consultation updates for customers, and a simple way for partner astrologers to set availability and see bookings without learning a dashboard.
The full V1 scope
One login by phone number, working across the site, portal, and WhatsApp. Staff and partners see only what their role permits.
Every stone a one-of-one listing with high-resolution zoom, filters that stay fast as inventory grows, and its own certification and origin attached.
Stone, then design, then metal, priced live as the customer builds, drawn from your design library and its stories.
Gold and silver rates feed pricing automatically, with the full breakdown shown so a customer sees what they are paying for.
A customer can hold a stone against a deposit while they decide, without the risk of two people buying the same piece.
Sourced, energised, packed, shipped, delivered. Each step dated and attributable, shown to the customer as it happens.
The independent lab report and your own Astrological Effectiveness Certificate, both verifiable by anyone from a QR code on the document.
Your free diagnostic, open without a signup wall. Scored, shareable, and routed to the right next step, whether that is a consultation or a stone.
Real availability from your astrologers and gemologists, timezone-correct for diaspora customers, confirmed and reminded over WhatsApp.
Streamed privately to the buyer who paid for it, recorded, and permanently tied to their order rather than a link anyone can pass around.
Indian and international payment methods, multi-currency display, insured and tracked shipping on both domestic and export orders.
Your team and the customer looking at the same order status, with returns and buybacks recorded against the original purchase.
Customer referrals and astrologer commissions tracked on a ledger, with payouts reviewed and approved before any money moves.
Your knowledge hubs, per-stone pages, and provenance stories built to be found, not bolted on as a blog.
One view of the customer across web and WhatsApp, so you can see which content and which astrologer actually produce sales.
Deliberately not in V1
The AI concierge, AR try-on, Hindi language parity, and limited-edition drops are on your roadmap but out of this build. We will structure the content, catalogue, and notification systems so each can be added later without a rebuild.
The five things that make this hard
Most of this scope is well-understood work. Five parts are not, and they are where a build like this quietly goes wrong six months in. We would rather show you our thinking on these now than discover a disagreement in month three.
Two people, one stone, same second
Because every stone is unique, two customers can reach the same piece at the same moment. And because a reservation takes a real deposit, getting this wrong is not a display glitch, it is a refund dispute with someone who believes they bought something.
Only one reservation can ever succeed. The second customer gets a clean, immediate answer rather than a hold that silently fails later. Whether an expired hold forfeits the deposit or returns it is your commercial decision, and we build it so you can change that rule later without a development cycle.
A live gold rate and a customer mid-checkout
If the metal rate moves between the moment someone adds a piece to their cart and the moment they pay, they get charged a number they never agreed to. That is a chargeback, and worse, it is a trust problem for a brand built on transparency.
The price a customer sees is locked to their cart for a stated window, and that is the price they pay. If the window lapses, they are shown exactly what changed and asked to accept it, rather than being repriced quietly.
An energisation only its buyer can watch
The usual shortcut is to let the video provider handle access, which reliably ends with a recording URL that works for anyone who has it. For a private ceremony performed for one person, that is not a small failure.
Access stays in your system, not the video vendor's. Both the live session and its recording are permanently tied to the order that paid for them.
A commission ledger that survives an argument
Affiliate money attracts disputes, and astrologer relationships are worth protecting. The ledger never overwrites anything: corrections are new entries, and credit for a sale is fixed at the moment it happens rather than recalculated later, which is how most commission arguments start.
Payouts are prepared as a batch your team reviews and approves before anything is transferred.
Notifications that cannot double-send
Duplicate messages are the fastest way to make a careful brand feel careless, and they almost always come from a system retrying after a failure. We handle this at the root, so a retry or a redeploy cannot produce a second message to a customer.
Channel choice is separate from the message itself, which means we can launch on SMS and email and switch WhatsApp on the day Meta approves your account, with no rework.
How it is built
The technical detail is available in full if your team wants it. The four decisions that actually affect you are these.
Modern stack, one language
Next.js and TypeScript across the storefront, the portal, and the systems behind them. Not Magento or a template platform. Fewer moving parts means fewer places for the build to drift.
Hosted in India
Every piece of personal data, including birth details, plus backups, stays on Indian infrastructure. This is a legal requirement for your customers, and it is not something we work around.
No vendor lock-in
Payments, messaging, streaming, logistics, and astrology computation each sit behind a layer we control. If a provider raises prices or degrades, we replace it without rebuilding the platform around it.
You own everything
Code, infrastructure, and documentation belong to AstroLaabh from week one, in your own accounts. There is no handover to negotiate at the end because there is nothing we are holding.
What we hold ourselves to
Speed
The site stays fast on a mid-range Android phone on 4G, including the high-resolution stone pages. Enforced automatically, so it cannot quietly degrade.
Uptime
A committed target, measured independently rather than by our own dashboards, and load-tested against a festival-scale peak before launch.
Security
Card details never touch your systems or ours. Every sensitive action is logged and attributable. Backups are tested by actually restoring them, not assumed.
Privacy
Explicit consent for birth data, a written retention policy that is actually enforced, and working export and deletion for customer requests.
Accessibility
WCAG 2.1 AA on the customer-facing site, checked by keyboard and screen reader on checkout and booking, not just by automated tooling.
Testing
Built into every week rather than saved for the end, weighted towards anything that touches money, certificates, or a customer's stone.
Timeline
Sixteen weeks from start to live. Design and engineering run in parallel rather than in sequence, which is what makes that possible: the systems behind the site do not need finished screens to be built.
| Stage | Weeks | What you can see and click at the end of it |
|---|---|---|
| Foundations | 1–2 | A live staging site your team can log into, with accounts and roles working. |
| Catalogue and pricing | 3–5 | A browsable stone catalogue with live gold-rate pricing and a full cost breakdown. |
| Commerce | 6–8 | A complete test purchase, from reserving a stone through payment to a tracked shipment. |
| Trust and experts | 9–11 | A bookable consultation, a verifiable certificate, a scored Efficacy Meter, a private energisation stream. |
| Growth | 12–13 | Referrals, commissions, both WhatsApp bots, content, and analytics. Feature-complete. |
| Launch | 14–16 | Live, after load testing, a security review, and a structured acceptance pass with your team. |
How you will know where things stand
A staging site is live and open to you from week two, updating continuously, so you are never judging progress from a status document. A demo of working software every two weeks, and a short written update every Friday covering what shipped, what is next, and what is blocked and on whom.
One team, design through to launch
Design and engineering sit inside Confetti, on the same schedule, in the same reviews. That matters more than it sounds. The usual failure on a build like this is a considered design that reaches a separate development team and quietly loses its detail in translation, and the brand ends up thinner on screen than it was on the page.
Here there is no handoff between companies. The people drawing your product and the people building it work to the same brief and answer to the same review, which is why we can commit to a sixteen-week timeline where design and engineering overlap rather than queue behind one another.
Confetti design team
Working from the identity already built in your brand book. The gold and sage palette, the sacred-geometry system, and the restraint in your Sanskrit usage carry into the product rather than being reinterpreted for the web.
Dhrumil Kherde
A product designer who ships production code, with five years building multi-role platforms and accessible component libraries. He sits across both sides of the studio, which is what keeps the design intact all the way into the browser.
Ayaan Retiwala
Three years building and running the core of a public cloud platform, taking production escalations directly. That background is why we put specific commitments against uptime, recovery, and the parts of a payment system that are hard to see from the outside.
Dedicated for the duration
This team is assigned to AstroLaabh for the length of the engagement, not rotated across other projects week to week. You will be speaking to the same people in week fifteen that you met in week one.
What we need from you
The schedule above holds if these arrive when they are needed. None are unusual, but three of them sit on external queues we cannot shorten, so they need to start in week one.
- Business documents in week one for payment gateway verification and Meta's WhatsApp business approval. Both are review queues that take weeks regardless of how quickly we build.
- The certification laboratory named early, so we can establish what is possible with their records. Most laboratories issue physical certificates and, at best, a report-number lookup on their own site, so we build the certificate registry, the QR code, and the public verification page ourselves and connect to whatever they offer. The answer differs by laboratory, which is why we need the name rather than a category.
- One decision-maker on your side who can sign off without escalating, so a question does not become a week.
- Your stone data and photography. Attributes, origin, carat and ratti, treatment status, and existing certificates for the launch catalogue, plus the product imagery.
- Written policy on reservations before week six: whether a lapsed hold forfeits the deposit, and your returns and buyback terms. We will draft a proposed version first so you are reacting to something concrete.
- Legal content: privacy policy, terms, return and buyback policy, and your named grievance officer.
Investment
Two components, quoted separately so you can see exactly what each part of the work costs.
| Component | What it covers | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| UI/UX design | Interface design across the storefront, all four portal views, and the WhatsApp flows. Art direction, the design system, and every screen carried through from your brand book. | ₹2,00,000 |
| Engineering | Frontend and backend build, integrations, infrastructure, testing, deployment, and launch, plus close monitoring through your first weeks live. | ₹3,75,000 |
| Total | Design and engineering, one team, one schedule | ₹5,75,000 |
Invoiced monthly. Changing your mind is free: reordering priorities, reshaping how a feature behaves, or swapping something out of a month for something else costs nothing and needs no paperwork, as long as the month's total volume of work does not grow. That flexibility is the point of working this way and we are not going to charge you for using it. If genuinely new scope pushes past a month's capacity, we tell you before we start rather than invoicing you afterwards.
Billed separately, at actual cost
Third-party services run on your own accounts and are billed to you directly at cost, with no margin from us: cloud hosting, payment gateway fees, WhatsApp messaging, video streaming, shipping and insurance, and laboratory certification. We will give you a full itemised forecast at kickoff so there are no surprises.
After launch
The engagement can continue at a reduced ongoing tier covering monitoring, incident response, security updates, and a defined allowance of changes. Roadmap items such as the AI concierge or AR try-on would be scoped separately when you are ready for them.
Next steps
A conversation
To confirm your launch date, settle the open items in section 07, and walk you through anything here your team wants to go deeper on.
Then, in week one
An architecture and data model document for your sign-off, environments provisioned, and the vendor approval queues started immediately so they are not the thing that delays launch.
Start date
We can begin within a week of a signed agreement. Engineering starts immediately and does not wait for design to finish.
If something here is wrong
Tell us. A correction now is worth considerably more to both of us than a discovery in month three.
Prepared for Aashray Singhal and Anuj Mehta, AstroLaabh.
Confetti Design Studio · Mumbai and Dubai