AgResource

AgResource's product is perishable in a way most content is not. A commodity market commentary written at dawn is a decision-making tool at breakfast and a history lesson by lunch, so the delivery pipeline is not a convenience feature, it is the product. We designed the app around a simple contract: the moment the research desk publishes, subscribers have it on their phones. That means a publish event flows straight through the backend, fans out to devices as a push notification when the update is time-sensitive, and lands in the reading view already formatted, with no refresh ritual and no waiting on the user to come looking.

The second problem is that market commentary is dense on purpose. It carries positioning advice, weather context, export figures, and the reasoning that connects them, and none of that survives being crammed into a generic news-feed layout. So the reading experience got the same attention as the pipeline: clean typography, a distraction-free layout, and a structure that lets a grower move through a daily newsletter in the minutes between tasks. The goal was that the analysis reads as clearly on a phone in a truck cab as it does on a desk.

Subscription tiers shaped the architecture more than any single screen. Daily newsletters, weekly newsletters, and Plus+ research reports map to different levels of access, so every piece of content carries entitlement rules and every request is checked against what the subscriber has actually paid for. Doing that server-side keeps the tiers honest: a client app can be decompiled, a backend entitlement check cannot. It also keeps each tier's library organized, so a Plus+ subscriber sees a coherent research archive rather than a stream with gaps.

Push notifications in a market app walk a narrow line. Send too few and the app fails its core promise of timeliness; send too many and subscribers mute the channel that was supposed to protect them. We built alerting around editorial intent rather than volume: time-sensitive, market-moving updates interrupt, routine publications simply arrive. That restraint is what keeps the interrupt meaningful months into a subscription.

The app is built with Flutter over a Node.js backend, with PostgreSQL for structured content and entitlements and AWS carrying the delivery infrastructure. One codebase serves iOS and Android so both audiences get the same research at the same moment, which for this product is the entire point. AgResource's Director of Sales and Marketing, Brandon Stickler, put the working relationship this way: "What put them over the top was their care for the client. Ensuring we were given exactly what we wanted, exactly when we needed it."