HopeAmazon

The problem

Selling rainforest protection to European supporters means asking people to pay for something they will never stand on. Every part of the product has to answer the same unspoken question: how do I know this is real, and what happens if it isn't?

That turns what looks like a donation page into a payments product with consumer-law obligations attached — one-time payments and subscriptions, in USD, to an audience protected by EU withdrawal rights.

What we built

The whole product, end to end: the public site and visual identity, an interactive MapLibre map of the protected areas, full internationalisation and SEO, authentication with six-digit verification codes and custom bilingual transactional email, a three-step onboarding flow, the supporter dashboard, and the admin panel for reservations, land submissions and refund requests.

Reservations cover hectares of Amazon rainforest in the state of Amazonas, backed by conservation contracts with landowners — USD 220 per hectare one-time, or USD 22 per hectare monthly, with a full refund if protection has not begun within six months.

The payment lifecycle is the product

A reservation is created only when Stripe's webhook confirms the payment — never when the browser says it succeeded. From there the system handles full and partial refunds, chargebacks, failed renewals with grace periods, and subscription cancellation with automatic refund. Every state transition is preserved as an auditable record rather than overwritten.

Refunds follow EU consumer law rather than a support policy: automatic and complete inside the 14-day withdrawal window, and into an administrative approval queue outside it. Terms of service, privacy policy and delivery-scope documentation were written in-house alongside the code, because the refund rule and the legal text have to say the same thing.

How it was validated

Evidence-based throughout. Every behaviour was verified against system logs and real production transactions, not against what the interface displayed — a UI can show "paid" for a payment that never settled, and in a product whose entire proposition is trust, that gap is the only one that matters.

Database schema, migrations, row-level security policies, transactional email infrastructure and the deployment pipeline were all part of the scope.