Refresh 2026: a production-grade event platform, built in weeks.

Refresh is the AME Zion connectional conference — an annual gathering that draws attendees from districts across the country. The 2026 edition needed a registration system that could handle online payments, send branded confirmations, track attendance in real time, and let organizers communicate with registrants by both email and SMS without leaving the platform.

The previous year’s registration ran through a generic event SaaS — usable, but expensive, opaque about the data, and incapable of carrying the conference’s visual identity. The organizers wanted something owned, something that looked like the conference, and something they could grow into over future years.

A complete registration system on Next.js 15 and Microsoft Azure: a public registration flow with Square as the payment processor, automated email confirmations and receipts through Azure Communication Services, a real-time admin dashboard for organizers to monitor registrations and revenue, CSV exports for finance and hospitality teams, and a mass-text notification system for sending updates to registered attendees.

The entire system runs on the same Azure App Service Plan as the rest of the district’s infrastructure — no new vendor contract, no per-registrant fee, no hosting that mysteriously scales itself into a budget overrun.

Refresh 2026 went live on schedule, processed registrations and payments cleanly from day one, and gave organizers an admin surface that they actually look at every morning during the registration window. The conference owns the codebase and the data. Next year’s edition is a one-line content update.