Snapshot
- Company: Photos by Nathan, a fine-art photography print store at photosbynathan.net
- Founder: Nathan Rupert, a San Diego photographer with more than 15 years behind the camera
- Use case: a custom print storefront with Printful fulfillment, Stripe payments, and a self-managed admin backend
- Before: template sites took a cut of his markup and buried his brand; a custom build was an $8,000 to $10,000 job he never commissioned
- After: he built it himself in three to four months of evenings and weekends, for roughly $400 to $500 on Bolt.new
- Key metric: about 95% under his own estimate for a professional build, and he works in tech, so the estimate was an informed one
Nathan Rupert has been photographing San Diego for more than 15 years. His dog-surfing photos became calendars twice over, once through Orange Circle Studios for the Amazon crowd and once through a Japanese publisher. Photography isn't his day job; that's a full-time tech role, 8 to 5. But it's never been just a hobby either.
The whole time, he wanted the thing most working photographers want: his own print store. "It's just not the same as having your own URL," Nathan said. "And your own ability to choose your pricing."
The ceiling on someone else's site
He tried the template route, the third-party sites with ready-made photography storefronts. They made the case against themselves. "I wasn't able to use my own branding and my own name," he said, "and they were taking a big chunk out of the markup." The storefront looked like their platform, not his portfolio, and every sale paid their fee first.
The custom route had the opposite problem. Nathan works in tech, so he didn't need a quote to know the price. "I know it'd be at least probably eight to ten thousand dollars," he said. That would have been a high price tag if Nathan were a full-time photographer, let alone for his side hustle. So for fifteen years, the store stayed an idea.
"Vibe coding is the big thing"
Nathan jumped into AI coding without much of a plan. "I was like, well, let me just try it," he said. "Vibe coding is the big thing, so I'm just going to try this out and see if I can create my own website."
It worked better than he expected. The buttons looked professional. The checkout flow made sense. And Bolt.new, an AI app builder, built things he hadn't thought to ask for, including a full admin backend where he logs in, uploads new photos, edits titles, sets crop rules so nothing ships awkwardly framed, and checks his orders. Update a product on one page, and the site quietly updates it everywhere else it appears. "That's a cool hover interaction," he remembers thinking about one unrequested flourish. "I didn't ask you to do that."
Three to four months of evenings and weekends later, in the spring of 2026, he had a store. Total spend: somewhere between $400 and $500.
The placeholder that almost shipped
The hard part wasn't the design. It was wiring the store to the real world. Printful, the print-on-demand fulfillment service, handles his prints, and Stripe, the payments platform, handles checkout. Connecting both meant secret keys, product mapping, and a stack of grown-up paperwork: a business license, an EIN, and sales-tax documents for both companies.
Then came the test order that earned its keep. Nathan ordered a print from his own site, and what arrived was Printful's placeholder image instead of his photograph. "I'm glad I did the test," he said. He worked through the fix with the AI, then had it build an end-to-end checkout test so the mistake couldn't quietly come back. One recurring build error along the way was stubborn enough that he emailed support, who fixed the issue and comped the wasted tokens. He kept going.
His store, his cut
Photosbynathan.net is live, hosted on Bolt.new, on a domain he owns. Every photo, price, and crop is his call, and no platform takes a slice of the markup.
Nathan is clear-eyed about what comes next, because he knows how prints actually sell. "People prefer a story behind the picture," he said, and that's why art walks work and cold websites struggle. So his plan is to take the store to San Diego's hotels and resorts: "If you guys want some local art that captures the essence of San Diego, check out this website."
Adding tabs
There's more coming. Photo tours of San Diego for tourists, for one. Any idea or new service that might appeal to Nathan is a few Bolt sessions away from being live.
That's the quiet shift in this story. For fifteen years, Nathan's print store depended on someone else's platform, someone else's price, someone else's yes. Now the store is his, and everything he could add is a matter of a few hours and another tab.
