CVBoost — AI-Powered CV Builder

A live BrilliMinds product that turns a person's real experience into a CV tailored to a specific job. The AI sharpens the wording, shows requirement by requirement how the CV lines up against a job description, and asks for missing details instead of inventing them. Free to build and preview, $12 once per CV to download.

Explore the case study Visit usecvboost.com

At a glance

16 technologies · 4 outcomes captured below

AI-Powered CV Tailoring Career Tools

Case Study

AI Product

Context

AI Product

Focused product scope with measurable operational and user-facing outcomes.

Technologies Used

React 19 TypeScript Vite Tailwind CSS Hono Node.js PostgreSQL Drizzle ORM Mastra Vercel AI SDK Typst pdfs.build Better Auth Polar Cloudflare Pages Coolify

Problem Space

The Challenge

Most AI CV builders optimise for a score. They rewrite a CV to hit keywords, pad it with numbers nobody can back up, and keep the result behind a monthly subscription. Job seekers end up with a document that reads well but is not true, which falls apart at the first interview question, while paying every month for a tool they need for a few weeks.

Delivery Response

Our Solution

BrilliMinds designed and built CVBoost as its own product. A person imports the CV they have or starts from scratch, improves it line by line with suggestions they accept, edit or dismiss, and tailors a separate draft to a pasted job description. Each requirement is marked Supported, Poorly expressed or Missing, with the line from the CV that backs it. They then pick one of 19 styles and pay $12 once to download a clean PDF.

Inside the Build

The product goals, delivery process, users, design direction, and outcome

This section walks through what the product needed to solve, how it was delivered, who it serves, and what changed after launch.

Goals

CVBoost is a BrilliMinds product for people who have real experience and need it written well for one specific job. The brief was narrow: the finished CV has to be something the person trusts enough to send, which means every line is true, worded well and matched to the role. That ruled out the usual AI CV builder pattern of a mystery score and confident rewrites full of invented numbers.

Keep the AI grounded in the person's own experience: when a line is vague, ask a question instead of making up a figure, and change nothing until the person accepts it.
Report job fit as evidence a person can check, with each requirement of the job description marked Supported, Poorly expressed or Missing next to the CV line that backs it.
Make ownership simple: free to build and preview, one payment per CV, no subscription, and manual editing that always works with or without AI.

Process

01

Product definition and principles

BrilliMinds started from five product rules and held every screen to them: the AI proposes and the person decides; never invent facts; report evidence instead of a score; pay once and own the result; manual editing always works. The journey was then cut to six steps that appear as a route at the top of every CV screen: Start, Improve, Tailor, Review, Style and Download. Prices and AI allowances live in one shared file, and a test fails if the landing page ever disagrees with what the product charges.
02

Grounded AI layer

The AI layer runs on Mastra and the Vercel AI SDK through an AI gateway, but what makes it trustworthy is the code around the model. Before a suggestion reaches the screen, a deterministic check compares every number, percentage and name in it against what the person wrote, and a rewrite that introduces a figure the CV does not contain is dropped. A role's facts stay with that role. When a line needs a detail only the person knows, the model returns a question instead of a rewrite, and the answer becomes the source for the new line. In tailoring, every quoted piece of evidence must appear in the CV as written, so a requirement is never marked Supported on the strength of a made-up quote.
03

Editor, import and PDF styles

The React editor is a structured document editor rather than a long form: sections and entries are edited in place, reordered by dragging and hidden with one click, with autosave, undo and a live PDF preview beside the content. Import reads a PDF, a Word file or pasted text into sections for the person to confirm, and the original file is not stored. The 19 styles are Typst templates published on pdfs.build, BrilliMinds' own document API, so the preview on screen and the downloaded file come from the same renderer. Every style takes five fonts, five accent colours, three spacing settings and A4 or Letter paper.
04

Payments, launch and job search tools

Payment is a single $12 checkout through Polar that unlocks one CV for good, with unlimited edits, style changes and re-downloads. The landing page and the app ship as one static build on Cloudflare Pages, with the Hono API and PostgreSQL on Coolify. The product then grew past the CV itself: a free application tracker, job import from a link, matching cover letters, application answers and interview preparation, opt-in follow-up reminders, a Chrome and Edge extension for saving jobs, and alerts for new roles on company job boards. The person always submits applications themselves.

Product Users

Professionals applying for a specific role are the core users: early to mid-career people who already have a CV and a job description in front of them. They import the CV, paste the job description and see, requirement by requirement, what the CV already supports, what is poorly expressed and what is missing. Tailoring happens on a separate draft, so the original CV stays as it is.

Graduates and career changers start from guided questions instead of an existing file and get the same line-by-line help. People running a longer job search use the tracker and the assistant to keep applications, follow-ups, cover letters and interview preparation in one place, next to the CV each application was sent with.

Design Direction

The app is calm and light: one white panel inset in a grey ground, a single royal blue accent, Comfortaa for headings and Outfit for everything else. The CV is always the most prominent thing on screen. In the editor the content sits in the middle with the live PDF preview beside it, and the six-step route across the top shows where the person is without forcing an order.

Status is always a word in a pill (Supported, Poorly expressed, Missing, Saved, Unlocked) and never colour alone. AI suggestions sit beside the line they would change, each with a one-line reason and the same three actions: Accept, Edit, Dismiss. The copy follows rules of its own: plain sentences, no superlatives, and no promises about interviews or screening software. The two-column visual styles carry a note that they are best sent to a person, because some application systems read columns out of order.

Outcome

CVBoost is live at usecvboost.com. Anyone can import a CV or start from scratch, improve it, tailor it to a job and preview it in any of the 19 styles for free, then pay $12 once to download a clean PDF they own. There is no subscription and nothing to cancel.

For BrilliMinds, CVBoost follows pdfs.build and Chapbook on the same TypeScript stack, and it runs on pdfs.build for every PDF it renders. It also shows how the team approaches AI features for clients: the model writes, deterministic code checks, and the person decides.

Visual Support