A premium in-home wellness marketplace for London

Summary

Conected is a premium in-home wellness platform on a mission to bring five-star, expert massage and treatments directly to homes, hotels and offices across London. Founded by Alexandra Frincu after her own journey through burnout, the brand promised vetted, in-house trained therapists who arrive fully equipped, with every session ending in a personalised wellbeing note. The ambition was clear, but the booking experience behind it still relied on phone calls, emails and manual scheduling.

TulipTech was engaged to turn that premium promise into a dependable, on-demand wellness app. In around six months, our team designed and delivered the complete two-sided marketplace, spanning customer and therapist mobile apps, an automated booking engine, secure marketplace payments, moderated real-time chat and a custom admin panel, from kickoff to App Store and Play Store launch. The result is a scalable, fully owned platform that lets Conected compete in an underserved market where booking is still often done by phone.

The challenge

Conected needed a premium, on-demand booking platform that felt effortless for clients and empowering for therapists, delivered to a fixed launch date. Customers had to be able to browse therapists, book a session, pay securely and track their therapist's arrival in real time, while therapists needed to manage availability, bookings, earnings and navigation from a single mobile app. Behind the scenes, the business needed full control without being locked into an expensive off-the-shelf CRM, since running back-office operations on a tool such as HubSpot would have scaled steadily as the user base grew.

The engineering brief was demanding. It called for a multi-step booking engine with dynamic pricing, automated therapist reassignment and configurable cancellation and refund rules, a reliable notification system across push, in-app and email with no duplicate messages, secure marketplace payments with therapist payouts, and location matching that connected customers to nearby therapists through live coverage zones. All of this had to be delivered cost-effectively, and early staging load times of more than thirty seconds raised understandable questions about whether the platform would be ready for real production traffic.

Our approach

TulipTech met each challenge with a pragmatic, cost-aware engineering decision that kept the client's long-term ownership and running costs firmly in view. Rather than tie Conected to an expensive third-party CRM, we built a custom admin panel in Next.js and included it at no extra cost, removing both the upfront setup bill and the recurring licence fees that an off-the-shelf tool would have carried. The backend API was deliberately designed to be CRM-agnostic, so HubSpot, Odoo or Zoho can still be connected later without reworking the core platform.

We tamed the booking engine through modular, PRD-driven development, breaking it into ten focused sub-PRDs with clear acceptance criteria and backend validation that rejects any out-of-scope selection. Notifications and chat were built on Supabase Realtime paired with Firebase Cloud Messaging, creating a resilient dual-channel system with content moderation that automatically blocks phone numbers, URLs and profanity. Payments were handled through a phased Stripe migration, developed on test keys and switched live on the same day as the app store resubmission to keep downtime to a minimum. Location matching used the Google Maps API within its free tier and startup credits to keep mapping costs low, and we right-sized production infrastructure so the platform runs lean while remaining ready to scale.

Key capabilities

Technology, security and compliance

Engineered as a secure, always-on wellness marketplace with an end-to-end type-safe stack, secure Stripe Connect payments, real-time chat moderation that blocks phone numbers, URLs and profanity, role-based admin controls and audit-ready booking records across web and mobile. Google Calendar access is used only to add and update confirmed appointments and is never shared for advertising, and full ownership of every cloud account, the source code and the intellectual property sits with the client.

See it in action

A closer look at Conected across all three products, from the customer booking journey to the therapist app and the back-office admin panel.

Results

The platform launched on its target date of 20 July 2026 with the full feature set live, giving Conected a first-of-its-kind on-demand wellness app in a market still built on phone and email bookings. Delivered in around six months from kickoff to App Store and Play Store approval, it went live with booking, payments, real-time chat, maps, notifications and the admin panel all in place.

The engineering choices did more than hit a deadline, they created lasting commercial value. The custom admin panel removed any dependency on HubSpot or Odoo and the licence fees that come with them, while right-sized production infrastructure keeps the platform viable even at early-stage volumes. The current setup comfortably handles around 1,000 active users and scales to 10,000 and beyond with incremental upgrades.

Most importantly, Conected walked away owning everything. The client controls every platform, including AWS, Supabase, Firebase, Google Cloud, the App Store, the Play Store and Stripe, along with the full source code and intellectual property. Built on an end-to-end type-safe stack of TypeScript and tRPC, the platform stays reliable and easy to evolve, ready to grow with demand rather than against it. It is a clear example of mobile app development where engineering decisions serve the business, not just the launch.