Background
Anyone trying to consume quality journalism today juggles five, six, ten separate subscriptions: daily paper, weekly, trade magazine, local outlets. Each with its own app, payment, login. On the publisher side the same fragmentation plays out — every house fights alone for reach, and distribution is hard work.
unlock set out to disentangle that world: a single subscription that unlocks premium content across many publishing houses. To make that work, the platform had to satisfy two very different audiences at once. For publishers: a reliable, secure ingestion path that doesn't disrupt existing workflows. For readers: a modern, fast product with app-grade polish and clean content presentation.
Solution
We own the full technical delivery — from architecture to infrastructure to day-to-day operations.
- Platform backbone. Next.js on Vercel as the user-facing app, complemented by our own services on European Scaleway infrastructure. Sovereign cloud not as a trend, but because the question "where does our data actually live?" is one that a media product can't hide behind marketing.
- Article ingestion via n8n. Each onboarded publisher gets its own pipeline: content is ingested, normalised, validated and mapped into the unlock data model. New partners come on board in days, not weeks. Pipelines are transparent, versioned and observable — no "black box where content disappears".
- AI where it earns its keep. Sovereign AI workflows analyse, categorise and extract key facts from incoming articles. Malicious-code sanitisation runs automatically so premium content stays safe. AI here is not a goal in itself — it extends editorial diligence into the automated parts of the stack.
- Mobile in the works. A Flutter app is in preparation so readers can use unlock outside the browser — same content, same auth, same subscription.
Outcome
unlock now processes over 4,200 articles per week automatically through the n8n ingestion pipelines (as of May 2026) — continuously, multilingual, fully editorial-grade. Five-plus publishing houses are integrated with full technical and contractual depth, and the first 650 readers were acquired with no paywall and no push, purely on the product itself. More importantly than the launch number: the system has been built for growth from day one — new publishers plug in with minimal engineering, new content types extend the model without touching the core.
Behind the scenes we executed a textbook platform pattern, done cleanly: scalable ingestion, robust data layer, lean user-facing stack, AI placed exactly where it removes measurable work. The platform is live at unlock-it.news.
Why this fits us
Platforms look simple — until they grow. Building unlock means making architecture decisions in year one that still hold up in year five — across multiple publishers, multiple devices, evolving regulation. We bring the platform-engineering depth, we've been operating in the sovereign-cloud space for a while, and we treat AI as a tool rather than a slogan. Exactly the mix this engagement needed.