PayGuard

Know who you're invoicing before you send the quote.

PayGuard is a risk-assessment tool for freelancers and independent contractors. Type what you know about a prospective client — payment history, communication style, anything you've heard — and PayGuard analyzes it for concrete red flags, assigns a risk level, and, when the risk is real, drafts a protective email proposing safer payment terms before you start work.

Built for AI Factory — Native.builder Hackathon (lablab.ai × NativelyAI), August 2026.

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The problem

Freelancers and small agencies routinely take on clients who turn out to be slow payers, non-payers, or difficult to work with — and there's rarely a fast way to check a client's reputation before committing time and effort. PayGuard gives freelancers a quick, structured way to sanity-check a new client using whatever information they already have.

Who it's for

Freelancers, contractors, and small agencies (dev, design, writing, consulting) vetting a new client before signing on.

How it works

1. Enter a client name and describe what you know about them — a warning from another freelancer, notes from a call, anything relevant.
2. A Supabase Edge Function sends this to an AI model (via Groq), which:
   • Extracts only concrete red flags actually present in the text (never invents risk that isn't there)
   • Assigns an overall risk level: Low / Medium / High / Insufficient Data
   • Gives 2–4 practical recommendations
   • If risk is Medium or High, automatically drafts a protective email proposing a deposit, milestone payments, or escrow
3. Results are shown immediately — no login, no data saved, fully stateless.

Tech stack

• native.builder — application platform, used to generate the UI, wire the Supabase backend, and deploy the app
• Groq — fast LLM inference for the risk-analysis step (llama-3.3-70b-versatile)
• Supabase Edge Functions — serverless backend that keeps API keys secure and off the client
• React + TypeScript + Tailwind — frontend, generated and refined via native.builder

Why it's a real workflow, not just a static page

PayGuard isn't a single AI call bolted onto a form. It's a small automated pipeline:

Input → AI reasoning (extract + score + decide) → conditional action (drafted email only when warranted) → structured output

The email draft only appears when the risk level actually justifies it — the system makes a judgment call, not just a lookup.

Local development

npm install
npm run dev

The Edge Function (supabase/functions/analyze-voice) requires a GROQ_API_KEY secret set in your Supabase project — get a free key at console.groq.com.

Privacy

No client data, transcripts, or assessment history is stored anywhere. Each session is independent.

Hackathon submission

• Problem solved: helping freelancers vet clients before taking on risky work
• Target user: freelancers, contractors, small agencies
• Built primarily with: native.builder, with Groq for AI reasoning