Product Overview
A non-technical summary of what PlayPalz is, how it makes money, and what state the platform is in. Written for stakeholders; the engineering detail is linked where it exists.
What PlayPalz is
A mobile-first social platform where fans pay to spend time with creators. Creators — called PlayPalz, and including e-girls, gamers, and coaches — build an audience and monetise it four ways.
The product is an iOS and Android app. The website is a marketing surface, not the product.
How money is made
| Revenue stream | What the fan buys | How |
|---|---|---|
| Creator subscriptions | Monthly access to a creator's private channel | In-app purchase, recurring |
| Play Coins | Virtual currency, gifted to creators during livestreams or spent in the store | In-app purchase, consumable |
| Sessions | A booked 1-on-1 with a creator | In-app purchase, one-off |
| Premium membership | A platform-wide tier | In-app purchase, recurring |
Creators set their own subscription price. PlayPalz takes a 20% platform fee on creator earnings, on top of the 15–30% Apple and Google take before the platform sees anything.
On a $10 subscription: roughly $7.00–8.50 reaches PlayPalz, the platform keeps about $1.40–1.70, and the creator receives about $5.60–6.80.
Creators are paid monthly, on a two-phase cycle: earnings are calculated on the 25th, and transfers reach creators' bank accounts from the 1st. Payments run through RevenueCat on the way in and Stripe Connect on the way out.
What a fan does
- Registers and completes onboarding, including choosing favourite games.
- Browses a personalised feed and an explore surface with trending creators, clips, and games.
- Follows creators, reacts, comments, and shares posts into direct messages.
- Subscribes to a creator to unlock their private channel.
- Chats there by text or joins voice rooms.
- Watches livestreams and gifts coins.
- Books 1-on-1 sessions.
- Buys profile customisation from the store.
What a creator does
- Completes creator onboarding, including identity verification.
- Sets a monthly subscription price.
- Posts photos, video clips, and text.
- Runs a channel with text and voice rooms, some subscriber-only.
- Goes live, with chat and coin gifting.
- Publishes availability and takes session bookings.
- Links external merch stores from their profile.
- Connects a Stripe account and gets paid monthly.
Platform state
Shipped and working:
- Accounts, onboarding, profiles, following
- Feed, posts with photo and video, comments, reactions, impressions
- Direct messages with realtime delivery, typing, and read receipts
- Channels and rooms, including subscriber-gated access
- Voice and video rooms
- Livestreaming with chat
- Push notifications with per-category preferences
- Search, trending, game catalog
- Session booking and availability
- Play Coin wallet and double-entry ledger
- Monthly creator payouts
- Image and video processing
In progress:
- Creator subscription purchases — the purchase flow depends on the client reporting back after a purchase, so a purchase completing while the app is closed can go unrecorded
- Discovery — the explore surface is powered by trending, which works well; the separate "discover" endpoint is a placeholder returning every user
- Content moderation — reports are captured, but nothing reviews them
- Store — products and inventory exist; the catalog is thin
Not built:
- Password reset
- Email delivery of any kind
- Stripe event handling (so Connect onboarding completion is not detected automatically)
- Refunds for cancelled sessions
Operational maturity
This is the part worth an executive's attention.
| State | |
|---|---|
| No staging environment | Every change goes from a developer's laptop directly to production |
| No CI/CD | Nothing verifies tests, types, or which branch is being deployed |
| No alerting | Outages are found by users reporting them, not by monitoring |
| Limited test coverage | The media and payout services are tested; the main API has none |
| Single-instance Redis | A restart interrupts realtime and queued work |
None of these are hard problems, and none of them are visible to users today. They are the difference between a platform that works and a platform that keeps working as the team and the traffic grow.
The recommended order:
- A staging environment. Removes "we deployed straight to production and it broke." A plan already exists; estimated $30–50/month.
- CI on pull requests. Runs type-checks, lint, and the existing tests automatically.
- Alerting. Grafana can alert on the logs already being collected — no new infrastructure.
- Automated deploys. Takes the laptop out of the critical path and makes rollback one command.
Cost
Roughly $277/month in fixed infrastructure, realistically $300–450/month all-in once video transcoding and CDN egress are included. Detail in Cost & Scaling.
Technology, briefly
| Layer | Choice |
|---|---|
| Mobile app | React Native (Expo) — one codebase for iOS and Android |
| Backend | Five Node.js services |
| Database | PostgreSQL |
| Hosting | DigitalOcean Kubernetes |
| Video | Mux |
| Voice | LiveKit, self-hosted |
| Payments | RevenueCat in, Stripe Connect out |
These are mainstream, well-supported choices. Nothing here is exotic, which means hiring for it is straightforward and the platform is not dependent on a niche technology.
Where to go next
- Capability Map — feature-by-feature status
- Cost & Scaling — what it costs and what happens as it grows
- System Overview — the technical picture