Send-2-Session (archived)

Archived snapshot of the May 3, 2022 deploy state. No longer maintained.

Apps, but no website. Just URLs.

The pitch in one paragraph

Most SaaS products are built from scratch: UI, auth, billing, dashboards, the lot. Send-2-Session asked: do they have to be? Stripe already has a Checkout page. Mailchimp already has a campaign signup page. Calendly already has a booking page. What if you could string those existing third-party pages together by their URLs into a complete user flow, and skip building most of the app? Send-2-Session is the orchestration layer that lets you define a "station" for each provider, extract the next session URL from its API response, and route the user onward. No website needed beyond a landing page.

How it works: the Stripe → Zapier → S2S loop

A user defines a flow as a sequence of stations. Each station points at a third-party SaaS page (e.g. a Stripe Checkout link, a Stripe Customer Portal session, a Mailchimp signup form). The orchestration is invisible to the customer. They just click through what looks like a connected sequence of pages.

A live example, end-to-end:

1. The customer hits a Stripe Payment Link and completes payment.

2. Zapier catches the Stripe webhook, creates the next session (e.g. a Customer Portal session), and pushes the resulting session URL to the matching S2S Station.

3. The customer lands on a stable S2S Station URL. S2S resolves it to the latest session URL pushed in step 2 and forwards.

S2S sits between the workflow engine (Zapier/Make/Pipedream) and the customer, providing a stable URL that no-code builders (Webflow, Carrd, Squarespace, …) can embed, while the actual destination is resolved at runtime. That's the gap workflow engines alone don't fill: they orchestrate well in the backend, but they don't give the customer a stable URL to be sent to when the destination URL is generated dynamically per session.

What's in this repo

Folder	What it shows
src/	React 17 frontend (Material-UI 4): landing, auth, station builder, session routing.
functions/	Firebase Cloud Functions: Firestore triggers and Express server for /station/url/** and /station/customer/** routes.
firebase.json	Hosting + Functions + Firestore + Auth + Emulator configuration.
build/	Compiled production bundle from the May 3, 2022 deploy (preserved as-is).

Tech stack

• Frontend: React 17, Material-UI 4, react-router-dom 5
• Backend: Firebase Cloud Functions (Node.js + Express)
• Data: Firestore (users → stations → sessions hierarchy)
• Auth: Firebase Auth (email/password)
• Hosting: Firebase Hosting + Functions

Status

• Active development: December 2021 – late 2022
• Last build & deploy: 2022-05-03 (live on Firebase Hosting)
• End-to-end loop verified through internal testing: 34 Customer-Portal redirects and 45 Mailchimp-Landing redirects logged through the live deploy
• Original Firebase project no longer maintained
• Frozen snapshot, not under active development

Why archived

The end-to-end orchestration worked. What ended the project was distribution: reaching no-code site owners who'd wire a fourth tool into their stack as a solo builder. Today, AI-native tooling would cut the build effort to a fraction; the validation discipline learned in Digitale Leute School's PM Bootcamp would tackle distribution before code.

What's been redacted

For archive hygiene:

• src/firebase.js: Web API key + project ID replaced with placeholders
• .firebaserc: replaced by .firebaserc.example
• firebase-emulators/ and node_modules/ removed (regenerable)

The compiled build/ bundle is preserved as the original deploy artifact. Firebase Web API keys are not secrets per Firebase's design (security is enforced via Firestore Rules); they are redacted in source for repo hygiene.

Running locally

This is an archive. Running it requires a fresh Firebase project. Steps:

1. Create a new Firebase project (Firestore + Auth + Functions)
2. Copy your config into src/firebase.js
3. Copy your project ID into .firebaserc
4. npm install && npm install --prefix functions
5. npm start for dev, npm run build && firebase deploy to ship

Acknowledgements

Initial project scaffolding (React + Firebase Auth + Firestore setup) was inspired by a YouTube tutorial for a URL-shortener (the package.json name shortly reflects that early origin). The session-flow orchestration logic, station/session data model, and Cloud Functions integration are original implementation.

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Restored in 2026 from a local archive of the May 2022 build.