I built an entire agency management platform by myself. Here's what actually happened.

I used to deliver food on Zepto. 14-15 hours a day. Sun, rain, didn't matter. I saved up, bought a laptop, and started doing video editing for clients. That's when things got messy. I was managing clients on WhatsApp. Tracking who paid me in Google Sheets. Sending invoices as PDF attachments that nobody opened. Every new client meant another chat group, another row in my spreadsheet, another folder I'd forget about. I went looking for one tool that could handle all of this. CRM, invoicing, projects, client communication — in one place. Everything was either $200+/month (when you add up all the separate tools) or missing basic stuff like a client portal. So I started building my own. That was a month ago. What I actually built Arpixa. One dashboard for agencies and freelancers. CRM, invoicing, project boards, AI assistant, file manager, scheduling, analytics, and a client portal where your clients can view projects, pay invoices, and message you. Every agency gets a branded subdomain — youragency.arpixa.io. Your clients see your brand, not mine. I'm not going to dump the whole feature list here. You can check arpixa.io if you're curious. The hard parts nobody warns you about Subdomains are a nightmare. Giving every user their own subdomain sounds simple until you realize auth doesn't work across subdomains by default. I had to build a token handoff system where you log in on one domain and the session gets securely passed to your workspace subdomain. It took longer than I expected going in — auth is the part everyone assumes is solved and nobody explains. Two payment gateways, because one isn't enough. I integrated both Stripe and Razorpay. Stripe for international users, Razorpay for India (UPI is how everyone pays here). The app auto-detects your country and shows the right payment flow. Sounds fancy — mostly it was just a lot of logic and twice the amount of webhook handling. Security rules will humble you. I wrote database-level security rules for every single co