Innovative OCR solution enhances eyewear retail efficiency, automating RX transcription for improved customer experience and operational streamlining.
At a glance
A US startup selling supplemental health insurance came to Coherent Solutions with an idea and no software. Its founder wanted buyers to take only the coverage they needed, priced on the spot, with the policy document generated at the end of the session. Coherent designed the architecture, built the platform, and put it into production four months after kickoff. The single-API design it rested on later let the founder sell integration access to partners as a product of its own, which was not in the original plan and did not require a rebuild.
Client overview
The client is a US startup in supplemental health insurance, selling accident, critical illness, and gap coverage that sits alongside a primary health plan. The company runs lean. One owner makes the product decisions, a small circle handles the commercial side, and several hundred independent agents sell the policies. With few staff available to absorb manual work, the client wanted the platform to handle as much of the routine work as it could.
The challenge
The client’s founder wanted buyers to take only the coverage they needed, see a price right away, and leave with a finished policy document, while agents could check their commissions in a portal of their own. The first plan was two separate websites, one for each audience. Both would rely on the same pricing logic and the same payment and insurance provider integrations, so building that logic once and sharing it meant any change or fix would only need to be made in one place.
Pricing needed to stay consistent everywhere it appeared. Quotes are calculated server-side from the buyer’s state, age, and other inputs, and the consumer and agent views of the same policy had to match, which is a compliance requirement more than a cosmetic one.
The client also had no existing system to validate against. As a greenfield build, it started from a founder’s vision, with third-party dependencies that had not yet been tested and a market the company had not yet entered.
Our approach
The work began during pre-sales, when a Coherent architect, a designer, and a business analyst worked with the founder to turn his vision into a backlog, produced UI prototypes, and ran proof-of-concept work against the two dependencies the rest of the build relied on. Those were the payment system and the several third-party providers that process the insurance requests themselves. That work let the team confirm how those integrations behave before committing to a delivery date.
The architecture decision followed from what the two sites actually had in common. Coherent built one API and put both front ends on top of it. Pricing, provider integrations, payment handling, and document generation live once, behind that interface.
The same decision made room for a change nobody had planned. Partway through development the founder sold API access to a partner, which meant the interface now had to hold up as a product in its own right, in addition to serving the two websites the client controlled. Because pricing, provider integrations, payments, and documents already lived behind that interface, absorbing the change took a reordered backlog, and the delivery date held.
The solution
Coherent delivered three channels on one architecture, built by a team of ten across .NET, front end, DevOps, QA, business analysis, and design.
The consumer site walks a buyer through a configurable set of coverage options, prices the selection server-side, takes payment, and returns a completed policy document. Generating that document was one of the more demanding parts of the build. The PDFs are structurally complex, and the team evaluated dozens of libraries before finding one that met the requirement.
The agent portal gives the agent network commission visibility and their own account tools. Coherent extended it in 2025 with a view giving agents their full quote and sale history, with filtering and analytics on top.
The API is the third channel, and the one the client sells to partners. It carries the same pricing, provider, and document logic the client’s own sites use, which is why it could be offered to partners as a product.
The system was sized for the client’s actual volume. Traffic runs in the hundreds of API requests, and the platform absorbed the client’s growth in agents and partners over two and a half years without re-architecture.
The impact
The client launched in May 2024, four months after kickoff, and has been in production since. The platform has carried the company from market entry through an expanding agent network without a rebuild, and the API gave the founder a way to sell access to partners, which was not part of the plan when the project started.
One integration did not reach production. The client asked Coherent to connect the platform to a partner whose systems were built around a CRM that held pricing and policy state locally, where Coherent’s design calculates it server-side on every request. The team built a working prototype and told the client directly that a production version would mean rewriting a large part of the platform to suit an architecture that fit it less well. The partner chose not to proceed, and the client kept working with Coherent.
The engagement ran without escalations for its full length, and Androv attributes that to staffing more than process. The team was senior, so the client could get a direct answer about trade-offs from the people doing the work instead of waiting for someone to go and find one.
What’s next
The platform now runs on a much smaller team than the one that built it. After launch, support moved from the full build team to a developer and a part-time QA engineer, and the 2025 quote and sale history work was delivered by a single engineer. Feature requests now arrive in small batches. The client has a system that a small team can run and extend whenever the business gives it a reason to.
