Internal Localisation CMS & Engine
Replaced a paid third-party localization platform with an in-house CMS and translation engine — full control of strings, locales, and release workflows, and roughly $50,000 a year off the SaaS bill.
What was broken
Product UI strings were managed through an external localization SaaS. It was expensive, opinionated about how teams should work, and a black box at exactly the moments a release needed control — string freezes, last-minute hotfix translations, locale-specific overrides. Every workflow had to bend around the vendor.
What I built
I designed and built an internal localization CMS and translation engine from the ground up. Strings, locales, and release states became first-class data; product and localization teams got a UI to manage them directly; and the engine wired into the release workflow so translations shipped on the team's schedule instead of a vendor's. It was as much an org-workflow design problem as an engineering one.
What changed
Roughly $50,000 a year in subscription spend gone, the external dependency removed, and the team handed end-to-end ownership of localization — including the release-time control they'd been missing. Strings, locales, and ship timing all lived in-house.