Case Study·Client project·EdTech marketplace
Live at craft-music.comCraft Music connects students with professional music teachers for live lessons. Our team built the core platform behind it: a server-rendered Nuxt site with teacher search and profiles, time-zone-safe booking and subscriptions, Stripe payments and Stripe Connect payouts, an admin panel and the NestJS API.
Vue 3.5
Nuxt 3
Pinia
PrimeVue 4
Tailwind
NestJS
PostgreSQL
Stripe Connect
AWS
Context
Craft Music matches students with vetted, professional music teachers for live online lessons anywhere in the US, and in-home lessons in select cities. Their previous site was a content site: it could show teachers, but not book or pay them.
We built the platform that turned it into a marketplace: students search by instrument, price and real availability, book a paid trial, then move to a weekly plan; teachers manage availability, run lessons and get paid out; and Craft Music's team runs everything from an admin panel.
It's a client project, so this page shows the live website and describes our engineering without publishing the client's code.
The Journey
This is how we worked with Craft Music, and it's how we approach client products: earn trust on a contained project, agree the scope and design, build the core, get the money right, launch, and keep going. Dates come from the project's git history.
Our first job for Craft Music was upgrading their existing site from Nuxt 2 to Nuxt 3, including the pre-rendering setup. It gave the client a supported framework without a rewrite, and gave us a working relationship before the bigger build.
The new platform was scoped in a statement of work: a marketplace where students browse professional teachers, filter by instrument and availability, and book live lessons. Design went through consultation, mockups and wireframes, client review and revisions until the Figma design was approved. That approved design became the reference for every feature.
The API, public site and admin panel were built side by side, starting with the parts every other feature depends on.
A marketplace is only as trustworthy as its money handling. This phase covered teacher payouts through Stripe Connect, signed Stripe webhooks, cancellation and refund rules, teacher applications, and admin tools for refunds, reviews and support reports. It ended with hardening the booking flow against two people grabbing the same slot.
Production got its own pipeline: version tags build Docker images in GitHub Actions and deploy them to AWS, with the previous image kept for rollback. The production domain switched over in early February 2026, and tagged releases have shipped since.
After launch we kept adding what the business needed: contract e-signing in teacher onboarding, a video processing pipeline, Google Calendar events for booked lessons, coupons and referrals.
Hard Problems, Solved
Booking and payments look simple until real users, real money and real time zones arrive. These are the problems we solved on Craft Music, described without exposing the client's code.
Where this applies to you Any product with appointments, classes or shifts across regions: tutoring, healthcare, consulting, field services.
Where this applies to you Marketplaces and directories where "available now" matters more than static filters.
Where this applies to you Ticketing, reservations, inventory and anything where two users can reach for the same thing.
Where this applies to you Subscription products with discounts, credits or revenue sharing, where billing bugs cost money and trust.
Where this applies to you Any product with cancellations, partial refunds or store credit.
Where this applies to you Two-sided marketplaces that pay out sellers, creators, tutors or contractors.
Where this applies to you Any product where users upload video or other large media.
Where this applies to you Content-heavy Nuxt sites that need SEO and marketing autonomy at the same time.
Architecture
The public site and admin panel are separate Nuxt apps on one NestJS API. Payments, chat, email and media processing run on proven services instead of custom infrastructure.
Vue & Nuxt Depth
Per-route rules: the home page is regenerated every 60 seconds, profiles and instrument pages are server-rendered, and dashboards are client-only.
The page builder lives in its own Nuxt layer with its own components, middleware and recursive renderer, keeping the main app clean.
Structured data and canonical tags per page, an API-driven sitemap, robots rules and llms.txt.
Inlined CSS was switched off after measuring its weight per page, PrimeVue components are whitelisted, and vendor code is split into separate chunks.
Pinia stores per domain (booking, payments, auth, chat) and composables for Stripe, uploads, page meta and the viewer's time zone.
Email, Google and Facebook sign-in, with global route middleware sending students, teachers and admins to the right place.
One payment form handling both one-off payments and saved cards for subscriptions, plus Stripe Connect onboarding for teachers.
Stream Chat for messaging and a Socket.IO channel for live video-processing progress.
A separate Nuxt admin for tutors, students, lessons, payments, refunds, coupons, reviews, content and settings.
A consistent component system across the public site and admin, themed to the client's brand.
A Mapbox map of in-home lesson coverage by ZIP code, built on US Census ZIP shapes.
The client's previous site was moved from Nuxt 2 to Nuxt 3 by our team before the new platform was built.
Is This You?
Profiles, search, booking, payments and payouts, with an admin team keeping quality up.
Availability, time zones, recurring plans, rescheduling and calendar events, without double-bookings.
Trials, weekly plans, coupons, credits, commission and refunds that all add up.
Server-rendered landing pages, structured data and a CMS your marketing team can use without a developer.
Large uploads, transcoding, streaming and live lesson rooms.
Moving to Nuxt 3 without freezing the business, then building on top of it.
FAQ
Yes. Craft Music is a client we've worked with since 2024: first a Nuxt 2 to Nuxt 3 migration of their existing site, then the new lesson platform. This page describes the parts our team built and shows the live website, not the client's source code.
Yes. Craft Music handles teacher availability, student time zones, recurring weekly plans, rescheduling, cancellations and Google Calendar events, with protection against double-booking. The same patterns apply to clinics, coaching, rentals and field services.
Yes. On Craft Music we built one-off payments, Stripe subscriptions, coupons, credits, refunds and teacher payouts through Stripe Connect, with signed webhooks and admin tools for the finance side.
Vue and Nuxt are our core, but this project included the NestJS API, PostgreSQL schema, AWS media pipeline and CI/CD. When your frontend work touches the backend, we can handle both.
Yes. Our work with Craft Music started with exactly that: moving their site from Nuxt 2 to Nuxt 3. Migrations and long-term maintenance are core VueSquad work.
Send us a short note on the contact page about what you're building and where you're stuck. We'll set up a call to go through your product and codebase.
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Talk to the engineers who built Craft Music's search, booking, payments and payouts. Tell us what you're building and where it's stuck.
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