Built a hotel website and booking engine that brought in ₹35L+ in revenue.

The problem

Sinclairs Hotels needed its own website and direct booking engine, with payments, that the business could keep extending.

What we did

• Designed and built the whole site end to end in Next.js and TypeScript on Vercel, with Neon serverless Postgres.
• Built a direct booking engine and integrated the ICICI payment gateway.
• Built an AI layer on top of the architecture so business teams can develop on it without engineering help.
• Set up GitHub Actions workflows with secrets guardrails, deploying to separate UAT and production environments.

Key decisions

1. 01

   One Next.js codebase on Vercel with Neon Postgres

   Trade-off: Relies on managed platforms, in exchange for very little infrastructure for a small business to run.

2. 02

   Separate UAT and production with gated pipelines

   Trade-off: An extra step before every release, in exchange for testing payments safely before guests see changes.

3. 03

   An AI layer for business users on a fixed architecture

   Trade-off: Guardrails are needed to keep their changes safe, in exchange for not depending on an engineer for every update.

Architecture

Result

The website brought in ₹35L+ in revenue and converted 15% of visitors in its first month.

What I learned

1. 01

   For a small business, the cheapest architecture to run is usually the right one.

2. 02

   Payments deserve their own environment before anything else does.

Stack

• Next.js
• TypeScript
• Vercel
• Neon Postgres
• ICICI Payments
• GitHub Actions