ProParent
Selected work
For the questions Google can't answer.
A multi-surface parenting platform built for ProParent: a warm app for parents, a dense web portal for the psychologists behind it, and the backend and CMS that connect them.
Visit the live siteBuilt by Pivot & Anchor, a small product studio.- Role
- Design & Engineering
- Client
- ProParent
- Platform
- Web & mobile
- Category
- Parenting support
- Stack
- Expo, AdonisJS, Postgres
- Status
- Live
Picture the parent at eleven at night. The kid is finally asleep, the phone comes out, and the question on their mind is not “best parenting apps.” It is specific, and they would rather not type it into a search bar. Is my eight-year-old's anxiety normal. Did I handle today's meltdown the right way.
Forums give them strangers. Search gives them blogs. A therapist is a six-week wait and feels like overkill. ProParent is the thing in between: a real child psychologist, one short session away, with context on their child already in hand. It was founded by Urvashi Musale, a National Award-winning child psychologist, and we built the platform that carries her practice to more families.
ProParent is not one app. It is a warm mobile app for parents, a dense web portal for the experts who answer them, an admin console for the team, and a CMS for the library in between. We designed and built all of it on one backend.
For parents
01 — Welcome
Raising a better tomorrow, today
ProParent opens warm, not clinical. The mark, the family, and a single promise of real help for the questions parenting actually raises. No forms to admire and no feed to scroll, just a calm front door into a space built for the eleven-at-night worries. It sets the tone the whole app keeps.
02 — Ask an expert
A psychologist, one tap away
The home screen leads with live chat rooms run by qualified child psychologists, alongside parents asking the same things you are. Search your concern or pick a topic like introverted child or screen time, and join a room. A credit balance sits in the corner and a live counter shows how many parents have joined today, so the place never feels empty.
03 — History
Every conversation, kept
Every live chat and one-on-one you have taken collects in one history, split between group rooms and private sessions. Each card carries the expert, their rating, the concern it addressed, and when it happened. The advice does not vanish when the call ends; it stays here to return to.
04 — The session
Who you spoke to, and what came of it
Open any session for the full picture. The expert's profile and specialisation, a summary of what the conversation covered, and follow-ups when there are any. A completed chat leaves behind something durable instead of a memory you half-recall the next morning.
05 — Empowerment Hub
Help for the in-between
Not every question needs a call. The Empowerment Hub is a growing library of expert-verified guidance, recommended against the concerns you have already raised. Browse by what is on your mind, from confident kids to career choices, and find something to apply tonight rather than book for next week.
06 — Inside a topic
Read, assess, do
Each topic opens into more than an article. Insights to understand it, assessments to check where your child actually is, activities to try together, and resources to go deeper. The same concern approached four ways, so guidance becomes something you can do, not just something you read.
07 — Your profile
Your progress and your credits
Your profile keeps the simple measures of showing up: chats joined, questions asked, insights read. Below it sits the wallet, with credits bought as a pack or granted in bulk by a school, and a clear balance so the cost of the next session is never a mystery.
Built for four people
Parents (mobile)
A warm, minimal iOS and Android app: live seminars, private 1-on-1s, the knowledge hub, and the wallet. Expo, with 100ms video and Razorpay.
Experts (web portal)
Psychologists work on laptops, so they get a dense web portal: availability, live sessions, parent notes, and contributions to the hub. Built for keyboards and two monitors.
The team (admin console)
A web console for oversight: users, sessions, schools, grants, and the moving parts of the operation.
The content team (CMS)
A Payload CMS for the library: articles, activities, assessments, and topics, published to the app without a deploy.
On the web
01 — The front door
Real help, right when you need it
The public site has one job, and it is to convince a worn-out parent in a sentence. Live group chats, private one-on-ones, and a growing library of expert resources, anonymous and judgment-free. The hero leads with the promise and the App Store and Play Store buttons, and the warmth of the brand reassures before a single word is read.
02 — Anonymity
Ask without anyone knowing it's you
The hardest parenting questions are the ones people are afraid to ask out loud. The site meets that fear head-on. You pick a display name, your real identity is never shown to other parents in a live chat, and the promises are stated plainly: anonymous by default, end-to-end encrypted, privacy-first by design.
03 — Schools
A way in for whole schools
ProParent also sells to institutions, so the site carries the school story. Grant free credits so cost is never a barrier, sponsor topic-specific live chats for a community, and onboard a whole parent body with a CSV or a shareable link. One surface speaks to the parent and to the school that wants to bring them in.
04 — The expert portal
A working tool, not a phone screen
Experts spend their day on laptops, so their surface is dense and built for it. The dashboard opens on the week at a glance: live chats held, parents helped, the average rating, today's schedule, and recent reviews. It is the cockpit a psychologist runs their practice from, not a scaled-up app.
05 — Availability
Set the week once
Availability is a recurring weekly grid. An expert paints the hours they are free, and the system turns those windows into the bookable slots parents see, in IST, conflict-checked against everything already on the calendar. Set it once and the booking machinery downstream handles the rest.
06 — Run the room
Host the session, moderate the Q&A
My Schedule lists every live chat the expert is running, upcoming and past, with the registrations on each. From here they open a room, watch the questions arrive, and moderate the Q&A, promoting the ones worth answering and keeping the session moving. A live room full of anxious parents, made calm to run.
07 — The admin console
Every live chat, overseen
The team gets its own console, and it starts with the sessions. Live Chats Management lists every group room across the platform, upcoming, live, completed, or cancelled, with participants, status, and credits on each. Create a new one, search the lot, and keep the whole schedule honest from one table.
08 — One-on-ones
Private sessions, tracked
The private one-on-ones get the same oversight. Every booking between a parent and an expert, with who, when, how long, the credits it cost, and where it stands. The team sees the entire flow of paid sessions without ever sitting inside one.
09 — Experts
Verify and manage the experts
A platform built on trust has to vouch for the people on it. Experts Management is where the team verifies psychologists, sets their specialisations and credit cost, and keeps each profile active and accurate. Verified and pending counts sit up top, so onboarding the next expert is never guesswork.
10 — Parents
The families behind the numbers
User Profiles holds every parent: their display name, relationship, children, onboarding status, and contact. The team can see who finished setup and who stalled, so a parent who signed up but never started is a problem they can actually find and fix.
11 — Credit plans
Price the credits, run the offers
Money is credits, and the admin sets the packs. A basic pack, a premium, an ultra plan, each with its price, its discount, and its active state. Adjust what a session costs, run a discount, and watch the whole credit economy from the same console the rest of the operation lives in.
ProParent runs on one backend serving four surfaces.
The backend is AdonisJS on PostgreSQL with Lucid, twenty-eight models covering the full domain: parents, experts, children, sessions, the wallet, schools. Identity is Clerk, and one of the quieter feats is that a single server speaks two auth dialects at once: bearer tokens for the mobile app, and sessions for the expert and admin web, which is rendered with React inside the same Adonis app.
Live video is 100ms, with role-based tokens (an expert can do what a parent cannot) and rooms created lazily on first join rather than at booking time. Money is credits, and the wallet holds three balances, bought, school-granted, and total, with row-level locks so two bookings can never spend the same credit twice. Payments clear through Razorpay with signature-verified webhooks.
Scheduling is its own problem. Expert availability windows generate bookable slots in IST, checked against existing sessions, with a minimum notice so nobody books a call for two minutes from now. Reminders, emails, and push run off a Redis-backed queue, and live session and recommendation updates stream to the app over server-sent events.
The library lives in a Payload CMS on its own database schema; when an editor publishes, a signed webhook tells the backend to refresh its caches. The whole system runs on Google Kubernetes Engine in Mumbai, with managed Postgres on IAM auth and no passwords in the cluster.
The hard parts
Two auth dialects, one server
Bearer tokens for the app and sessions for the web portal, with a guard against duplicate user creation on first login.
A credit ledger that can't drift
Three balance types and row-level locks so concurrent bookings never spend the same credit twice.
Live video, role-aware
100ms rooms created on demand, with tokens that give experts and parents different powers.
Scheduling without conflicts
Availability windows turned into bookable slots in IST, conflict-checked, with a minimum-notice rule.
Content without a deploy
A Payload CMS that publishes to the app through a signed cache-invalidation webhook.
ProParent leans on a serif to feel human, not clinical. DM Serif Display carries the headlines, Poppins handles the interface, and Open Sans does the long reading in the knowledge hub.
- DM Serif DisplayHeadings
- PoppinsSubheads & UI
- Open SansBody & articles
The palette is warm on purpose, a coral that reassures rather than a clinical blue. Sage and teal carry success and guidance, and a soft peach holds the background.
- CoralPrimary. CTAs, the brand, live indicators.#F28B6E
- TerracottaDeeper coral for depth and pressed states.#D4766E
- SageSuccess and positive states.#81C784
- TealGuidance, tips, and data.#4DB6AC
- PeachWarm surfaces and the app's edges.#F9A88D
- InkHeadings and body text.#1F2937