The page everyone was looking for

Long before any app, the puzzle page was why a lot of people bought the newspaper.

You bought it for the news and stayed for the crossword. Took it on the bus, left it on the kitchen table, came back the next day. It was a habit before the word engagement existed.

Coquetel built seventy years of catalogue on that logic. But the newspaper became a news site, and the crossword stayed on paper.

The reader is still there. What changed is the surface.

The challenge

News sites live with a familiar problem: the reader arrives through a headline and leaves in ninety seconds. They don’t come back that day, often not that week.

Puzzles solve this better than almost anything else, because they create predictable return — people come back because they want to finish.

But licensing puzzle content was a slow process: a sales conversation, a contract, delivery by email, loose files. None of that scales to the small and mid-sized outlets who need it most.

What was missing wasn’t content. It was distribution.

Subscription instead of negotiation

We turned the catalogue into a product that contracts itself: plans by weekly game volume, card or instant bank transfer, immediate plan changes, no lock-in.

A regional newspaper visits the site, picks a plan that matches its size, and publishes puzzles the following week. No meeting required.

Content licensed by email doesn’t scale. Content licensed by self-service does.

On Coquetel’s side, the admin panel shows what’s needed to decide: recurring revenue, active subscribers, most downloaded games by format, usage per account, and leads from the contact form.

The PDF comes out of the JSON

The technical decision that saves the most day-to-day work: the system generates the PDF from the game’s data file.

The team uploads the JSON in the format they already use internally, and the platform produces the publish-ready file on its own. Word searches and crosswords come in this way, with no manual layout, no intermediate step.

One step fewer per game, multiplied across every week, is what decides whether a product survives real operations.

Delivering also means letting go

The project ended the way it should: with the client operating without us.

Code, hosting, database and files were transferred to Ediouro’s own accounts, with a manual written for two different readers — the person who operates the panel and the person who maintains the code. Step-by-step acceptance, secret rotation, the first thirty minutes after handover.

No passwords in the document. No dependency on the agency after acceptance.

A product is genuinely delivered when it keeps working after the people who built it walk away.

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Notes for the nerds

Stack

• Astro 6 with server-side rendering + React 19
• Tailwind CSS 4
• Drizzle ORM over Neon Postgres, São Paulo region
• Private Vercel Blob for game files
• Pagar.me v5 for recurring billing
• Node 24, deployed on Vercel

Security

• JWT session in an httpOnly cookie
• Passwords hashed with bcrypt
• HSTS and clickjacking protection
• Rate limiting on login, sign-up and the contact form
• Middleware separating client and admin areas by role

Catalogue and publishing

• Three active formats: crosswords, sudoku and word search
• Upload PDF + JSON, or JSON alone
• Automatic PDF generation from JSON for the catalogue’s formats
• Deactivating a game or category without losing download history

Subscription

• Four plans by weekly volume, from free to bespoke
• Card or instant bank transfer, automatic activation via webhook
• A manual activation flow available in parallel, for direct negotiation
• Weekly limit enforced at download time, per plan

Admin panel

• Recurring revenue, paying subscribers and manual activations, average revenue per account
• Downloads by format and by period
• Usage per company: active days, downloads, recency
• Contact form leads

Handover to the client

• Repository, hosting project, database and storage transferred to the client’s own accounts
• A 12-section operations and handover manual, with no credentials in the document
• Secret and admin password rotation as the formal step that ends the agency’s access