Scholarcert — A Full Certificate Platform Built from Scratch

The Client

Scholarcert is a platform for academic conference organizers who need to issue, manage, and deliver verifiable digital certificates at scale. The product serves conferences of any size — from small workshops to large international events with thousands of attendees, speakers, session chairs, and award recipients.

The Challenge

Issuing certificates for an academic conference sounds simple, but the reality is anything but. Without a proper platform, organizers have to pull recipient lists from spreadsheets, open design files one at a time, type in each name and title by hand, export a PDF, and then email hundreds of certificates individually. A single event can take days of manual work.

On top of that, there is usually no way to verify a certificate is real. If an attendee lists a conference certificate on their CV and an employer wants to check it, there's no system to confirm it. Certificates are easy to forge, and organizers have no record of who has actually received what, when, or whether they opened the email.

Scholarcert needed to exist as a proper platform — one that could handle certificate templates, bulk generation, automatic delivery, and public verification, all while being flexible enough for any kind of academic conference.

What Zyndix Built

Zyndix designed and built the entire Scholarcert platform from scratch — now live in production. The system shipped in thirteen phases and covers every step from template design to post-delivery analytics.

Certificate templates, the easy way. Organizers can upload HTML templates directly, or drop in a PDF design and have Claude's vision AI convert it into an editable HTML template automatically. Every template supports dynamic fields — recipient name, affiliation, session, award type, date — and custom fields defined per conference. There are eighteen built-in placeholders covering partners, multiple signatures, and legacy layouts.

Recipients, handled at any scale. Organizers can add recipients one at a time through the dashboard, bulk-import them from a CSV file with column mapping and validation, push them in through the REST API, or receive them via webhook from other systems. Once recipients are in, everything else happens automatically.

Bulk generation, in the background. Scholarcert uses a Puppeteer rendering engine running in Docker containers to generate both PDF and PNG versions of every certificate at scale. Each certificate gets a unique display ID (like SC-2026-A7X3K) and a QR code that links to a public verification page. Generation happens in a background job queue with retries and progress tracking, so organizers can kick off a batch of thousands and walk away.

Three delivery modes. Every conference can choose how certificates go out: immediately upon generation, scheduled for a specific date and time, or exported manually for the organizer to send themselves. Emails go out through Postmark with DKIM verified, custom sender name, custom reply-to, and per-conference email templates. Reminder emails, scheduled deliveries, and webhook callbacks for delivered, opened, and bounced events are all built in.

Public verification. Every certificate has its own public page at verify.scholarcert.com where anyone — employers, universities, reviewers — can confirm it's real without logging in. They can download the PDF, print it, or share it directly to LinkedIn, X, or Facebook. The platform tracks every view, download, scan, and share, giving organizers a full picture of post-event engagement.

A proper API. Scholarcert includes a full REST API with key-based authentication, so existing event management tools can create conferences, add recipients, and trigger certificate generation automatically. Outbound webhooks with HMAC-SHA256 signatures mean other systems can react to certificate events in real time.

Partners, signatures, and multi-branding. Every edition of a conference can have up to three partner logos and up to three signatories — each with an image, name, and title. This makes the platform work for conferences with multiple sponsoring organizations or multi-institution events.

Team management and roles. The platform supports role-based access control (platform admin, organization admin, editor, viewer), invite-based team management, and a full audit log of every action.

Billing built in. Scholarcert runs on a credit-based billing model with seven packages, full Stripe integration, server-side credit enforcement, and an onboarding checklist for new organizers.

The Architecture

Scholarcert runs on a two-server production setup in Helsinki: one server handles the web application and database, the other runs the certificate generation workers, PDF exports, and scheduled jobs. The stack includes Next.js 16, Supabase for database and authentication, Hetzner Object Storage for all file storage, Postmark for email, Stripe for billing, Redis and BullMQ for the background job queue, and nginx with Let's Encrypt for SSL. Deployments run through simple scripts over GitHub, and the whole system is containerized with Docker.

Results

What used to take days per event now takes minutes. Organizers can upload a recipient list, click generate, and walk away — certificates are created, emailed, and verifiable within the hour. Every certificate is forgery-proof, publicly verifiable, and tracked from generation through to delivery and download. The platform has been live in production since April 17, 2026, with all thirteen phases shipped including billing, partner branding, and engagement analytics.

Why It Worked

The project worked for two reasons. First, Zyndix built the platform around the actual workflow of an academic conference organizer — not a generic certificate tool. Features like multiple signatures per edition, partner logos, custom fields per conference, and three delivery modes exist because real conferences need them. Second, the architecture was built to scale from day one. Background job queues, container-based rendering, and a proper REST API mean the platform handles ten certificates or ten thousand with the same click.

This is the Zyndix approach: understand the exact workflow, build for real scale, and ship production-ready infrastructure — not prototypes.