Under the hood

Tech stack & roadmap

We’re an independent team — building in the open is part of the product. Here’s the stack we ship on, what’s already live, and what’s coming. Private details (secrets, infra topology, internal tooling) are intentionally omitted.

Architecture in plain English

Three services run in a single private network:

  1. A web app (this site) — handles auth, billing, the dashboard, and the credit ledger.
  2. A render worker — never exposed to the internet. The web app sends it signed jobs; it talks to Gemini and Remotion, then uploads finished banners to a public CDN.
  3. A Postgres database — single source of truth for users, credits, and the job queue. No Redis, on purpose.

Credit deductions and banner inserts happen in one Postgres transaction so a concurrent submit can’t double-spend a credit. If a render fails, the credit is automatically refunded.

Frontend

App Router, React Server Components, API routes
UI runtime
End-to-end type safety
Utility styling, design tokens

Backend & data

Magic-link email auth
Typed SQL, migrations, query layer
Primary datastore + job queue
Render worker (internal-only)

AI & rendering

URL → headline, CTA, palette, image prompt
Gemini 3 Pro Image (Nano Banana)
Banner background image generation
Programmatic video / animated GIF rendering
Headless browser for URL scraping

Content

Editorial CMS for the blog — Content API only
Custom Next.js renderer
Posts rendered with the BannerKit look, not the Ghost theme
Webhook revalidation
Instant publish via signed Ghost outbound webhooks
JSON-LD + OpenGraph
Article schema + per-post canonical for SEO

Infrastructure

Self-hosted PaaS, container orchestration
Traefik
Reverse proxy + automatic TLS
Docker Compose
Service topology
S3-compatible CDN for hosted banners

Commerce, email & abuse defense

Card payments, one-time credit packs
NOWPayments / crypto rails
Crypto checkout (5% discount)
Transactional email delivery
Proof-of-work bot challenge on signup

Roadmap

Honest status — “next” is committed, “later” is wishlist.

URL-to-banner + prompt-to-banner
Shipped

Paste a URL, get the headline, palette, and a Gemini-generated background. Or describe the banner from scratch.

9 IAB-standard sizes, 10 animation presets
Shipped

Leaderboard, medium rectangle, skyscraper, and the rest. Subtle, neon, glitch, sparkle, and more.

Credit packs + crypto checkout
Shipped

Stripe-backed card payments and a 5% crypto discount. Credits do not expire.

Persistent CDN gallery
Shipped

Every completed banner gets a non-expiring URL — drop it in any ad network, email, or page.

Anti-fraud signals dashboard
Shipped

Disposable email blocking, IP velocity gates, fingerprint capture, and an admin drill-down for IP clusters.

Referral program
Shipped

Share a link, earn credits when referees buy. Visible in the dashboard widget.

Public share pages with social meta
In progress

Each banner already has a public URL; richer Open Graph cards and embed snippets are next.

Editorial blog (Ghost-headless)
Shipped

Ghost runs as a private CMS at cms.bannerkitai.com. Posts are rendered by Next.js using the BannerKit look — JSON-LD, OpenGraph, RSS, and instant webhook revalidation built in.

Custom logo + brand color upload
Next

Drop in a logo and brand palette and have it applied across every size automatically.

Subscription tiers
Later

Monthly plans with included credits and unlocks for higher resolution / longer animations.

Public API
Later

Programmatic banner generation for power users and agencies. Out of scope for v0.1 on purpose.

Team accounts
Later

Shared credit pools, roles, and a unified gallery for agencies.

Video output
Later

MP4 / WebM exports of the same animation engine that already drives our GIFs.

Bundled with the community

BannerKit AI is a standalone product, but it’s also bundled with the Amplify AI Workshop Skool community — a paid community for builders shipping AI tools. Members get build-along sessions, source-code walkthroughs, and credits in tools like this one.