Applications & Internal Tools
FORGE Running Labs
Built the membership platform behind a running community’s Replit site: member accounts, Stripe subscriptions, and live Zoom sessions inside the site.
- Client
- FORGE Running Labs
- Role
- Backend & Platform
- Year
- 2026
The work
FORGE Running Labs is a running community founded by Timothy Allen Olson, two-time Western States 100 champion and record holder for the full 2,653-mile Pacific Crest Trail. The site started as a Replit project with a strong editorial front end, five training journeys from 5K to 50K+, a community calendar, the Lab, and Stories. Behind it there was almost nothing: one health route, an empty database, and join and member pages that were static mockups.
The goal was a paid membership business. Members pick a journey, pay monthly, and join live sessions with Timothy without leaving the site, and it had to keep running on Replit for now without locking the client into Replit later.
I built the whole backend: an Express 5 and TypeScript API in a pnpm monorepo, a shared Drizzle schema on Neon Postgres, and an OpenAPI contract that generates typed React hooks and Zod validation for the front end. Then I connected the existing member pages to real data while keeping their original design.
What shipped
- Self-hosted Better Auth with cookie sessions in the client’s own Postgres, route guards, and server-only roles
- $79/month Stripe membership with signature-verified webhooks, a customer portal, and grace periods for failed payments
- Zoom’s full web client embedded in the member dashboard, with an admin page for scheduling sessions by journey
- Moved from Replit-only editing to GitHub branches, local development, and separate Neon branches for dev and production
- Every infrastructure choice made so the platform can leave Replit without a rewrite
- Express
- TypeScript
- React
- Neon Postgres
- Drizzle
- Better Auth
- Stripe
- Zoom SDK
- Resend
From the process
Next project
O’Keeffe’s