Investment research, delivered securely.
Primaresearch was distributing paid datasets by email — no version history, no audit trail, no way for clients to preview a file before downloading. We built a B2B data portal where admins publish, clients preview, and every action is logged.
Primaresearch sells investment-grade market datasets — retail, financial services, mining, telecommunications — to paying clients in South Africa and beyond. The product is the data. The business is trust.
But distribution was manual. Email attachments. No version history. No audit log. Compliance was a spreadsheet exchanged over Slack. Clients had no way to preview a dataset before downloading it and calling back to say "wrong file."
The team needed a self-serve portal where authorised clients could browse the catalogue by category, preview a dataset before downloading, and pull the full file via a secure link. Admins needed to upload new versions without touching code, restructure the category tree without a developer, and answer audit questions with a searchable log — not a memory.
The infrastructure budget was ~R500/month at scale, single digits early on. That's not a nice-to-have. That's the brief.
Frontend: Next.js 14 on Vercel for the global CDN. Backend: NestJS on Railway in the Singapore region to sit close to the Mumbai Supabase instance. Latency stays under 40ms for the South African client base without paying for a dedicated region.
Database: Supabase Postgres via Prisma ORM. Storage: Supabase Storage, files served through presigned URLs. Auth: JWT with hashed refresh tokens and TOTP MFA on every account — no exceptions, no "we'll add it later."
The trick that made the product feel professional: SheetJS renders the first 100 rows of any XLSX or CSV inline. Clients confirm the file structure before spending a download. Full files come through Supabase Storage presigned URLs, valid for a few minutes.
The category tree started as a hardcoded enum. Round three of client feedback flipped it: an editable, unlimited-depth tree that admins manage themselves. Retail → Clothing → Premium → Q4 2025 Sales, six levels deep if needed. No developer required.
Every action — upload, edit, archive, download — audit-logged and searchable by client and dataset. Auditors get answers, not stories.
What we built it with.
The intelligence layer.
From brief to production.
What shipped.
We went from sending files by email to running a real product. Clients see the catalogue, preview the data, download what they need. Our compliance officer stopped asking me questions — she just searches the audit log.
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