PACTO — AI-Powered Agreements

Turning promises into intelligent, transparent, and verifiable commitments.

Inspiration

Every day, entrepreneurs, freelancers, and businesses enter into agreements involving responsibilities, deadlines, deliverables, and payments. Yet many still rely on informal messages, disconnected documents, and manual follow-ups.

When expectations are unclear, trust breaks down.

We built PACTO to bring artificial intelligence, structured collaboration, verifiable evidence, and PayPal payments into one connected experience.

Our mission is simple: make agreements clearer, commitments accountable, and payments traceable.

What It Does

PACTO is a functional AI-powered agreement management platform that connects the entire lifecycle of an agreement.

1. Create structured agreements

Define responsibilities, deliverables, financial commitments, and milestones between participating parties.

2. Analyze agreements with real AI

PACTO integrates Anthropic's Claude to analyze agreement content, identify potential risks, highlight ambiguities, and provide actionable recommendations.

AI findings are linked to the agreement and recorded for traceability.

3. Collaborate and verify evidence

Both parties can accept commitments, submit supporting evidence, review deliverables, and authorize milestones.

4. Process payments with PayPal

PACTO integrates PayPal's Orders API and Sandbox environment to demonstrate payment creation, approval, capture, and refunds.

Payment states are verified through server-side processing and signed webhooks.

5. Track the entire agreement lifecycle

From creation to final closure, PACTO maintains a structured history of decisions, evidence, approvals, payments, and important actions.

6. Explore without registration

A dedicated Judge Mode allows evaluators to explore the agreement workflow using demonstration identities without creating a personal account.

How We Built It

PACTO combines modern web technologies with AI and financial infrastructure:

Next.js, React, and TypeScript for the application and interactive user experience.
Supabase and PostgreSQL for authentication, structured data, and persistence.
Anthropic Claude API for contextual agreement analysis.
PayPal REST APIs and Sandbox for payment workflow validation.
Row-Level Security (RLS) and role-based authorization for data isolation.
Signed PayPal webhooks for trusted payment-event processing.
Vercel for production deployment.

We designed PACTO around server-side validation, controlled AI usage, auditability, and secure access to agreement data.

Challenges We Ran Into

Reliable financial workflows: Payment approval in the browser is not sufficient proof of payment. We implemented server-side capture validation, signed webhook verification, and protection against duplicate event processing.

Refund traceability: Real PayPal refund events reference capture identifiers rather than always providing the original order identifier. We corrected the reconciliation workflow without unnecessarily expanding database permissions.

Responsible AI: Early AI analysis could overlook financial context. We improved the analysis so that agreement terms and milestone amounts are evaluated together.

Security and operating costs: We implemented access controls, protected server-side credentials, and usage limits to reduce the risk of unauthorized access and uncontrolled AI consumption.

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

Deployed a functional application accessible online.
Integrated real Anthropic AI analysis into agreement workflows.
Successfully validated PayPal Sandbox payment capture and refunds.
Verified signed payment webhooks and transaction audit records.
Completed an agreement workflow from creation through payment and closure.
Implemented a demonstration experience for judges.
Passed 225 unit and integration tests, alongside production end-to-end validations.

These results demonstrate more than an interface prototype: they show a connected workflow involving AI, human authorization, evidence, and payment infrastructure.

What We Learned

Building PACTO reinforced that trust in digital agreements requires more than storing documents.

AI must provide useful context, payment events must be independently verified, and every important action should be traceable.

We learned to treat AI recommendations as decision support, not legal guarantees, and to build financial workflows around verifiable server-side events.

What's Next

Our next priorities include expanding agreement templates, introducing intelligent reminders, improving collaboration, strengthening production monitoring, and preparing for additional real-world pilot testing.

Live payment processing will require separate production configuration and operational validation. The demonstrated payment integration currently uses PayPal Sandbox.