// the take
Pency is a multi-tenant Next.js storefront builder aimed at small merchants in Argentina who sell through WhatsApp: product catalog, cart, and a WhatsApp checkout handoff, with an admin panel to manage inventory. It's for someone who wants a lightweight self-hosted alternative to a full e-commerce platform when the actual checkout happens over chat, not a payment flow.
The codebase is organized by domain (cart, product, tenant, session, payment) each with its own api/components/hooks/types, which keeps a fairly sprawling app navigable. It has real test coverage across three layers - Jest unit tests, Storybook for isolated component development, and Cypress for e2e - which is more rigor than most repos this size bother with. Firestore rules enforce the one-store-per-user constraint at the database layer instead of just in application code, and CSV bulk import for products is a genuinely useful feature for a real merchant onboarding a catalog.
Dead since January 2023 - three years with no commits, no dependency bumps, and Next.js/Firebase SDKs have moved on since then. It's hard-wired to three external services (Firebase, Cloudinary, MercadoPago) with zero abstraction between them, so swapping any one out means rewriting the integration from scratch rather than changing a config. The setup process requires pasting your Firebase service account credentials into a third-party online AES encryption tool (devglan.com) to generate the value for a config file, which is a credential-handling practice nobody should replicate even for local dev. Payments are MercadoPago-only, which caps usefulness outside Latin America, and the one-store-per-user Firestore constraint rules out any team or multi-admin setup for a store.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →