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Building Dossier: A Client Portal SaaS with Amazon RDS PostgreSQL and Vercel

How I built a white-label client portal for freelancers using Next.js 15, Amazon RDS PostgreSQL, Amazon S3, and Vercel — submitted for the H0 Hackathon.

Nobel

Building Dossier: A Client Portal SaaS with Amazon RDS PostgreSQL and Vercel

This article was created for the purposes of entering the #H0Hackathon.

The Problem

Freelancers and small agencies use 5+ disconnected tools to manage clients — Notion for projects, Stripe for invoices, email for updates, Dropbox for files. Clients get frustrated constantly asking "what's the status?" and providers waste hours context-switching between apps.
I built Dossier — a white-label client portal that consolidates project management, invoicing, file delivery, and communication into one branded experience.

Why Amazon RDS PostgreSQL?

Dossier has 15 database models with complex relationships: organizations, users, clients, projects, milestones, deliverables, invoices, messages, and activity logs. I needed:
  • Relational integrity — foreign keys between projects → milestones → deliverables
  • Full-text search — GIN indexes for searching across clients, projects, and messages
  • Multi-tenancy isolation — every query scoped by organizationId
  • Reliability at scale — automated backups, point-in-time recovery
Amazon RDS PostgreSQL gave me all of this with managed infrastructure. I didn't want to worry about patching, backups, or failover during a hackathon — RDS handles it. The connection from Vercel's serverless functions works seamlessly with connection pooling via Prisma.

Architecture

Vercel (Next.js 15)
│
├── Server Actions (mutations)
├── API Routes (Stripe webhooks)
├── Edge Middleware (auth + routing)
│
▼
Amazon RDS PostgreSQL ←── Prisma ORM (15 models)
│
├── Organizations, Users, Clients
├── Projects, Milestones, Deliverables
├── Invoices, Messages, Activity Logs
└── Auth tables (Sessions, Accounts, OTP)
Amazon S3 ←── Presigned URLs for file uploads
Stripe ←── Subscriptions + Invoice payments
Anthropic Claude ←── AI project summaries
Resend ←── Transactional emails
The AWS pieces:
  1. Amazon RDS PostgreSQL — All application data. 15 models, full-text search with GIN indexes, multi-tenant isolation.
  2. Amazon S3 — Deliverable file storage. Presigned URLs for secure upload/download without exposing credentials to the client.

How Vercel connects to RDS:

Next.js Server Actions and API Routes connect to RDS through Prisma ORM. Prisma handles connection pooling critical for serverless environments where each invocation could otherwise exhaust database connections.

Try It

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