Plink: UK film and TV location marketplace

Business problem

Production teams needed a trustworthy way to discover and enquire on UK shoot locations, while homeowners needed guided listing, privacy controls, and a sustainable way to stay visible, without public hire rates or open booking.

What needed to happen

Plink is a named, live marketplace. The public product is a focused Phase 1 platform: listings, billing, messaging, and content, with staff review before a location goes live.

What I built

Receivers complete guided onboarding and a Stripe subscription before a listing can be published. Spenders search a tagged catalogue, save locations to shareable projects, and open structured enquiry threads. Marketing and legal pages are CMS-driven. Staff use an internal hub for review and support.

How it works

A production marketplace with end-to-end listing, billing, messaging, and content workflows, built for privacy, moderation, and long-term operability.

Technical detail

• Django 5.2 application with listing, account, and enquiry steps enforced so a location cannot go public until the required checks are complete
• Wagtail CMS for marketing, FAQ, legal, and site settings
• Stripe Checkout, Customer Portal, and webhooks for receiver subscriptions
• Celery and Redis for image conversion, listing packs, and queued email
• Cloudflare R2 for media; Postmark for transactional email; Render for web, worker, and scheduled jobs

What shipped

• Role model: Receiver, Spender, Admin, and guest
• Listing lifecycle with staff moderation
• Privacy-minded public cards, no public day rate or full address
• Async enquiry messaging with proposed budgets
• Spender project boards with shareable links
• Wagtail-driven marketing and legal content

Technology

• Django
• Wagtail
• PostgreSQL
• Redis
• Celery
• Stripe
• Postmark
• Cloudflare R2
• Render