Product · Time tracking SaaS
TimeUp
Multi-tenant time tracking for wellness businesses — passkeys, real-time scheduling, and payroll-ready hours.
Summary
The Challenge
Local businesses operating blindly with WhatsApp and notebooks. Owners permanently busy and an operative staff with low affinity for complex technological tools.
The Solution
A Multi-tenant Cloud platform with friendly onboarding, biometric Passkeys without cumbersome passwords and a kinetic Real-Time flow.
The Impact
MVP built in 10 weeks under an optimized architecture. Deployment with near-zero operating costs before gaining real production traction.
“If onboarding took more than ten minutes, the implementation failed.”
The Functional Premise
Constraints
What shaped the architecture.
The context that defined the architecture and forced us to avoid over-engineering.
Low Patience Users
Business owners aged 30 to 50. The flow could not assume any prior technical knowledge. That's why we transitioned from slow email schemes to using Native Biometric Hardware (Passkeys).
MVP Against the Clock
Developed and modeled by a single maintainer, forcing the choice of hyper-productive tools (Turborepo + Next).
Tenant Quality
Semi-open onboarding system. Requires administrative approval in the Backend, creating complex database states PENDING.
Serverless Zero-Cost
The app had to pivot with a dead burn rate. Pure deployment on Vercel & Supabase Free isolating demanding components.
Non-negotiable management of Digital Informed Consents with PDF electronic signatures for invasive medical treatments.
Product screenshots
Dedicated tools by role.
Admin
Global analytics and control center.
Owner
Performance metrics and configuration.
Staff
Live agenda and client management.
Key decisions
Trade-offs that keep the product running.
Turborepo Monorepo
Building multiple React ecosystems forced crossing business logic, TypeScript types, and Prisma schemas. We opted for the initial rigidity of monorepositories to orchestrate multiple coupled bases with automatic caching.
The Operational Cost
Initial tooling delayed v.1, but scaling between deployments became completely instantaneous weeks later.
WebSocket Isolation
Platforms like Vercel and Edge Functions punish prolonged open connections (Timeouts and dead SSE in minutes). We extracted the bidirectional engine to a Virtual Machine with NodeJS + pm2 + Redis PubSub acting as a real-time pipeline.
The Operational Cost
Monitoring fragmentation; we went from just looking at Vercel logs to having to constantly review metrics on an Ubuntu droplet.
Biometric WebAuthn Login
Forcing local staff to remember long strings interrupts their operational work. The strong implementation of hardware-integrated biometric APIs (FaceID / Fingerprint) cut access friction from several minutes to fractions of a second on the counter tablet.
The Operational Cost
Extremely high complexity in the fallback; forced maintaining an extra robust system via SMTP Magic Links.
Lessons learned
What broke in production.
Technical implementations rarely survive real user behavior and cloud limits. What caught fire and how we fixed it.
Connection Pooler Choking
Combining serverless with cold database engines burned connection limits and broke pipelines.
WebAuthn & Origin Mismatch
An extra slash in production CORS config collapsed the passkey flow on first deploy — cryptographic origins must match exactly.
State Purgatories & Ghost Users
Semi-approved entities dragged values that contaminated cohort metrics in later KPIs.