InstaElfie
A fun holiday photo app that adds Christmas magic to your photos—built as a proof of concept with Stripe, Supabase, and generative AI.
The spark
When nano banana was released over the holidays, I was experimenting with the model and thought of creating an app to add Christmas magic to photos. I came up with a working app with Stripe integration, full Supabase backend including private storage, auth and security. It was just a toy but was a fun proof of concept. I recently upgraded the site to nano banana 2 and it is a meaningful upgrade.
What it is
- A holiday photo app that uses generative AI to add festive elements to your photos.
- Full payment integration via Stripe for premium features.
- Complete Supabase backend with private storage, auth, and security.
- Recently upgraded to nano banana 2 for significantly improved results.
Stack
- Next.js for the web application.
- Supabase for backend, private storage, auth, and security.
- Stripe for payment processing.
- Generative AI (nano banana / nano banana 2) for photo manipulation.
- Vercel for hosting.
What I learned
- A toy project can be a great vehicle for learning full-stack integration patterns (payments, storage, auth) end to end.
- Upgrading the underlying model (nano banana to nano banana 2) produced a meaningful quality jump with minimal code changes.
- Shipping a complete, working product—even a small one—teaches you more than any tutorial about real-world integration gotchas.