Case Study: Manatí (Costa Rican Drupal agency) achieves a fast, scalable decoupled contraband‑reporting platform in 2 months with Pantheon

Contraband Reporting on a Decoupled Site

Manati, a Costa Rican Drupal agency, built Mercado Ilegal for AMCHAM and the Ministerio de Hacienda to crowdsource reports of contraband distribution. The project required a decoupled, multilingual, map‑driven web app with heavy frontend interaction and a very aggressive two‑month timeline—making a headless architecture and tight delivery schedule the core challenges.

Manati implemented a Drupal backend and single database on Pantheon with an AngularJS frontend, Organic Groups for multi‑site/domain management, and optimized maps and metadata handling (using JSONP at the time) to enable fast, mobile‑first performance. The team delivered the site on time, publishing MercadoIlegal.com (Costa Rica) and ComercioIlegal.gt (Guatemala), enabling monthly government reporting, simplifying future rollouts across Latin America, and saving time by offloading infrastructure to Pantheon.

Manatí

Alberto Rojas

Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder