Instrumental Teachers Hub — a full SaaS platform, built solo.
A multi-platform membership product for professional instrumental teachers across the UK. Built and shipped entirely solo from architecture to App Store submission — web platform, two mobile apps, subscription billing, and a production AI feature.
Piano AI Professor — the ITH companion app
A profession running on scattered paperwork.
Private instrumental teachers in the UK run small businesses without any of the infrastructure a small business normally gets. Lesson policies, safeguarding documents, invoice templates, GDPR notices, and terms of service are typically assembled from whatever a colleague sent over years ago and edited by hand every time something changes.
They also work alone. There is no staff room, no shared reference for what a reasonable cancellation policy looks like, and nobody to ask when a parent disputes a fee. The professional community exists, but it is spread across social media groups where the useful answers disappear within a week.
The brief was to build one product that solved both problems: a compliance and admin toolkit that removes the paperwork, and a community platform where the profession can actually talk to itself. Subscription-funded, so it stays independent and keeps improving.
Two constraints shaped everything. It had to work on a phone, because teachers are between lessons rather than at a desk. And it had to be built by one person on a budget that assumed no external funding round.
One product, three surfaces.
WordPress and BuddyBoss web platform
The web app carries membership, the document library, and the community. BuddyBoss provides the social layer; the membership logic, gated content rules, and admin templates are custom. Choosing a mature platform for the parts that are solved meant the budget went into the parts that were not.
Flutter apps on iOS and Android
One Flutter codebase ships to both stores, so a fix lands everywhere at once. Native app presence matters here — teachers reach for a phone between lessons, and an install on the home screen gets opened far more often than a bookmark.
Token-bridge authentication
The hardest part of the build. A signed token bridge lets the Flutter app authenticate against WordPress and carry a session across into web views, so a member signs in once and moves between native screens and web content without hitting a second login. One identity, one subscription, two platforms.
Stripe subscriptions and OpenAI Vision
Stripe handles billing, with webhooks keeping membership state correct through upgrades, failures, and cancellations. The AI Professor uses OpenAI Vision to read a photograph of handwritten notation and give feedback on it — a paid feature inside the product, running server-side with the key never leaving the backend.
Live, paid for, and in the stores.
- +Membership, payments, community, and mobile apps shipped end-to-end
- +Token-bridge auth between WordPress web app and Flutter mobile app
- +OpenAI Vision AI Professor integrated into production product
- +UK-ready compliance pages and admin document templates included
The product is live and charging £15 a month for full access including the AI Professor. Both mobile apps passed review and are available on the App Store and Google Play, which for a solo build means the whole submission process — store listings, privacy declarations, review responses — was handled in-house rather than deferred to an agency.
Eleven UK-ready compliance and admin templates ship with membership, covering the documents a private teacher would otherwise write from scratch. The result is a product that earns its subscription on day one rather than promising value once the community reaches critical mass.
Why this project is the reference.
Most portfolios show finished screens. This one shows a product that takes payments, survives app store review, holds a session across two platforms, and runs an AI feature in production without leaking a key. Every service on this site was proven here first — the WordPress build, the AI integration, and the SaaS architecture are the same skills applied to a smaller brief.
Building something at this level?
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