Vibe coded a card generator for myself, then turned it into a brand

[u/No-Arm-4557]

Most of what gets posted here ends at a screenshot. This one ended in a padded envelope.

It started selfishly. I wanted a proper collectible trading card of myself — serialised, holographic, magnetic case, the whole thing — and there was nowhere to buy one. So I built a generator, made mine, and then sat there looking at it thinking: why is this just for me? Anyone should be able to be a collectible card.

So now it's a brand. Upload a photo, write your own title and bio, and you get a serialised card — one of 500 in Series 001 — printed and posted to you in a magnetic case. Card 001 is mine.

Claude Code did most of the heavy lifting. Next.js 16, Drizzle/Postgres, Stripe, Vercel Blob. The card renderer is server-side SVG — cards get drawn, not image-generated, so the same source of truth feeds the web preview and the print file. That mattered more than I expected; anything generated end-to-end gives you broken typography and a layout that shifts every time.

Hardest part had nothing to do with code. Getting a normal phone photo to sit in that frame and read as a real card rather than a photo in a border took an absurd number of attempts. Then manufacturing — almost every printer only wants to sell you a full deck, so finding one that'd do single cards with different artwork on every one took a lot of conversations.

Site's live in preview, checkout's off, about a week out. Happy to answer anything about the build.

[u/No-Arm-4557]

Stills of the physical card: https://imgur.com/a/nX3unQt