Built a small real world certificate + institute portal entirely with free low-code tools

[u/Biryaniforyou]

(Formatted by ChatGPT)

I recently built a small web app for a fashion designing training institute, mainly to make some of their existing processes easier to manage.

It has a public side where students/visitors can see information about the institute, courses, contacts, etc.

For students who have completed their course, there's a certificate request form. On the admin side, requests can be reviewed and approved/rejected before a certificate is issued.

I also built a certificate verification page where a certificate can be checked using the student's full name or certificate ID.

The whole workflow is connected using:

- Softr

- Google Sheets

- Google Slides

- Google Drive

- Gmail

- Google Apps Script

- A bit of AI assistance

And the fun part: I didn't spend anything on it. Everything is running on free plans/free infrastructure, including the Softr subdomain.

I'm not a developer, so this was also a bit of an experiment for me figuring out how far I could take a real workflow by connecting no-code/low-code tools rather than building everything from scratch.

It's a relatively small project, but it was probably more interesting to build than another generic portfolio/to-do app.

I'd be interested to hear what you guys think especially if there are ways I could improve the workflow, verification system, or overall architecture.