EdPlace — an online-course marketplace with a course constructor and adaptive video

The founder was launching an EdTech startup from zero: a fresh idea, no existing audience, and no working prototype. The vision was a marketplace where any expert could publish and sell a course, and any student could find, pay for, and complete it comfortably — with an open rating and review system that kept quality honest. What was missing was the technical implementation and, critically, a platform economy the founder could actually own.

Two problems defined the build. On the expert side, there were no simple, functional tools to package knowledge into a course with several content types — video, audio, text, assignments — and to run learners through it as managed groups. On the student side, the friction was catalog navigation, filtering by topic, secure payment, and technical annoyances like buffering video on a weak connection. EdPlace was designed to remove both, and to do it on infrastructure the founder controls end to end rather than rents from a course-builder SaaS.

The commercial model is the reason EdPlace exists as a custom build rather than a Teachable store. Ready-made platforms are faster to launch, but they charge a commission on every sale, cap how far the reward system can flex, and keep the payment and learner data inside their walls. For a founder whose whole thesis is a proprietary course economy, that is renting the business rather than owning it.

So the payout layer was built as first-class product logic. Commission percentages, expert payouts, and the finance view are configuration against the reward model, not a code release — the operator can change the economics without an engineer in the loop. Because the marketplace, catalog, and entitlement services are decoupled, adding a new content type, a promotion, or a new role later is a configuration change rather than a rebuild.

Data posture is enforced at the architecture layer. Learner accounts hold only what enrolment and delivery need, payment records sit with the payment processor under a tokenized customer ID the storefront never sees, and role-based access controls what each cabinet can reach. The result is a platform that is auditable and scalable by design — not a prototype that has to be re-plumbed before it can grow.

EdPlace launches as a single Laravel + React platform serving experts and learners across the United States and the European Union. The application tier is stateless and horizontally scaled, so it can be pinned to EU or US regions independently for future data-residency commitments, and payment processing is configured per region against the operator's chosen acquirers.

Data handling is aligned with GDPR for European learners and acknowledges the US state-privacy patchwork — CCPA / CPRA in California, VCDPA in Virginia, CPA in Colorado, CTDPA in Connecticut, UCPA in Utah, TDPSA in Texas, and Oregon CPA. Consent is region-aware at the client layer, right-of-access and deletion flows are wired into the admin tier, and the platform is built to sit comfortably inside an ISO 27001 posture. The engineering team behind the build runs a CET workday with an East-Coast US overlap (9 AM–1 PM ET) for stand-ups, product sprints, and incident response.