SWAP Translators
The agency that runs itself
A certified translation agency operating in Colombia, the US, Ecuador and Australia used to quote by hand over WhatsApp and spreadsheets. Today it quotes in seconds with AI, charges in three currencies across seven payment methods, assigns every job to the right translator on its own, runs each delivery through quality control and manages its corporate accounts receivable — all on one platform we built and keep evolving.
Duration
Ongoing · since March 2026
Started
March 27, 2026
One database, one pricing engine, five channels
Since April 2026 · 4,900+ documents processed
Across 35 languages and 4 certification types
In-house and freelance, assigned automatically since Oct 2026
Every quote started with a document sent over WhatsApp or email.
Someone counted words or pages — scans and phone photos included — looked up the rate for the language pair and certification type, worked out the express surcharge and replied hours later, by which time the client had often gone cold. Jobs were handed out to more than 100 translators over chat, and quality control, deliveries, translator payouts and corporate receivables lived in Google Sheets. These are legal documents for visas, immigration and official procedures: a wrong price or a wrong delivery has real consequences.
- — Manual quotes that took hours, with scanned documents impossible to count by eye
- — More than 100 translators coordinated through chats and spreadsheets
- — Three currencies, seven payment methods and mandatory e-invoicing in Colombia
- — Pricing and availability rules that change by language, certification, client and urgency
Twelve systems that share one database and one pricing engine.
We shipped an AI quoting MVP to production in six days and have kept building on the same foundation in phases ever since — from the moment a client uploads a document to the moment the translator gets paid.
- + Instant AI quoting · up to 50 files per quote, OCR for scans and photos, blank-page, duplicate and protected-PDF detection, live price by language pair, certification, urgency and volume
- + WhatsApp sales agent · reads the documents clients send, quotes with the same engine as the website, detects payment receipts and hands over to a human only when it should
- + Payments and billing · 7 methods (Wompi, Stripe, PayPal, OpenPay, DeUna, Zelle, bank transfer) in COP, USD and AUD, with automatic DIAN e-invoicing through Siigo
- + Client and B2B portals · edit a quote before paying, negotiated rate cards, own SLAs, prepaid or credit terms, statements per currency, aging and partial payments
- + Automatic assignment engine · every paid order is split into work units and routed to in-house translators by real daily capacity, or offered to freelancers simultaneously — first to accept wins
- + Quality control · auto-assigned QA pool with shifts, rubric-based review, findings attributed to the translator and delivery alerts before anything reaches the client
- + Translator portal and payouts · offers with watermarked previews, file delivery, deadline reminders, monthly payment statements generated atomically in SQL
- + Fulfillment and reporting · notarization, apostille and courier dispatch with tracking; management reports by channel, translator, language and QA
Inside the build.
Brand, interface and system — shown as they shipped.
The interface is the tip of the iceberg.
SwapAI is not a website. Beneath a clean UI sits a transactional core with row-level security on every table, payment and e-invoicing integrations, eighteen scheduled engines and an AI agent selling on WhatsApp. By our own estimate, about 70% of the effort went into backend, data, integrations and AI.
AI inside the workflow, not bolted on
Cloud Vision OCR on 2,470 documents, Gemini answering on WhatsApp with a fallback model, RAG over SWAP’s knowledge base, Whisper for voice notes, and an extraction cache that avoids paying twice for the same file. Every call is logged for cost control.
One pricing engine, five channels
Public web, client portal, B2B portal, WhatsApp agent and staff edits all call the same function. The bot never invents a price: rates, coupons and express availability are injected live, never left in the prompt.
Financial idempotency
A payment creates exactly one order even if the webhook fires twice, with a backup cron if it never arrives. Payout statements are generated atomically in SQL, numbered and versioned, with alerts if a charged amount differs from the current price.
A deterministic assignment engine
Runs every two minutes against each translator’s real capacity — quota, cut-off, schedule, absences, what they already delivered today — with locks against double assignment and simultaneous freelance offers.
Security across four kinds of users
Staff with combinable roles, clients, corporate accounts and translators share one database and each sees only their own data: hardened RLS, a 35-permission role matrix, signed short-lived file URLs and IDOR protection on every download.
Hybrid AI Coding
A senior WebMinds engineer directs AI agents (Claude Code) that implement, while an independent QA agent reviews every change before production. Architecture, judgment and client decisions stay human. That is how 592 commits and 212 migrations shipped in about six and a half months.
Technologies & Tools
The tech stack powering this solution
Beyond the numbers, we delivered a system that transformed how this client operates.
From hours to seconds
Any client uploads documents — scanned or photographed — and gets price and delivery date instantly, on the web or on WhatsApp. More than 1,600 quotes and over a million paid words so far, with the same pricing engine on every channel.
An operation that assigns itself
Since October 6, 2026, every paid order reaches the in-house translator with free capacity or is offered to freelancers in seconds, goes through QA with shifts and a rubric, and is delivered by secure link. The spreadsheets and coordination chats are gone.
One system, end to end
Quoting, payments in 3 currencies and 7 methods, e-invoicing, production, QA, physical fulfillment, B2B receivables and payouts to 100+ translators — all on one auditable database with role-based permissions.
- Mar 27, 2026Project kickoff
- Apr 2, 2026MVP in production: automatic quoting, admin with roles, 8-stage CRM pipeline
- Jun 2026Phase 2: client portal, integrated payments and Siigo e-invoicing
- Aug 12, 2026WhatsApp AI agent starts serving clients
- Sep 2026Phase 3: B2B pricing and portal, suppliers, production, QA and translator portal
- Sep 18, 2026The order becomes the central record, replacing spreadsheets
- Oct 6, 2026Automatic assignment engine switched on
- NextPhase 4 in planning: multi-user B2B accounts, multi-language quoting, management reports, AI translation after payment
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