Reference-checking platform built from scratch — sixteen application screens, Stripe credit billing, automated referee chasing, server-generated PDF reports, inbound bounce processing, and a PWA with push. Wrapped in a programmatic SEO estate of 181 marketing pages.
RefAssure is a UK reference-checking platform for employers and recruiters — request a reference, and the system chases the referee until it comes back, then issues the finished report as a PDF.
Reference checking is universally disliked and almost never solved. Referees ignore the first email, someone in HR spends a fortnight chasing by phone, and a candidate's start date slips. The existing software addressed it by selling annual contracts and demos, which works for enterprise HR teams and is completely wrong for the recruiters and small employers who feel the pain most acutely.
The brief was therefore two products at once. A platform good enough that the chasing genuinely happens without anyone thinking about it — and a commercial model where a recruiter can sign up and run one reference this afternoon for 99p, with no contract and no sales call. Then an SEO estate big enough to be found by the people searching for a way out of the problem.
Every Mako Digital case study includes a complete build specification — the actual technical decisions that made the project what it is.
Every Mako Digital build follows a documented approach — consistent across every project, calibrated to each client’s industry, brand, and customer journey.
Anyone can build a page that emails a referee. The reason reference checking is painful is that referees do not reply — and someone in HR ends up chasing by hand for a fortnight. RefAssure automates the follow-up on a schedule, tracks where every request has got to, and gives the employer a live chase status instead of a hopeful silence. That is the actual product; the form is just the way in.
Competitors sell annual contracts and demos. RefAssure sells references from 99p each, dropping to 80p at volume, bought as credits through Stripe Checkout with invoices and a transaction ledger behind them. A recruiter can sign up and run one reference this afternoon without speaking to a salesperson — which is a commercial decision the billing architecture had to support from day one.
A platform whose entire value is email deliverability cannot send mail casually. Transactional sending runs through the Postmark API with webhook event handling, bounces are processed by an hourly IMAP job so a dead referee address is caught rather than silently swallowed, and a scheduled health-watch task monitors the pipeline. If a reference request does not arrive, the platform knows.
Sixteen purpose-built application screens — dashboard, candidate list and detail, reference creation and viewing, chase status, team management with invitations and roles, account and reference settings, credit purchase, invoices, PDF download, and an admin oversight console. Behind them a REST layer, a PWA wrapper with web push so a completed reference reaches the phone, and server-side PDF generation for the finished report.
The platform is wrapped in a programmatic SEO estate — comparison pages against the incumbents, guides to DBS and right-to-work checks, and deep sector clusters for warehouse and logistics recruitment and temp agencies, down to searches as specific as night-shift warehouse references and GLAA licence requirements. Each one targets a real question a recruiter types, and every one of them routes to the same sign-up.
If we wouldn’t put it on our own business, we wouldn’t put it on yours.The Mako Digital Standard
RefAssure Case Study: Mako Digital designed and built RefAssure, a UK reference-checking SaaS platform. The build delivered 197 pages — 16 application screens and 181 marketing pages — on a bespoke theme with no page builder. It includes Stripe Checkout credit billing with invoicing and a transaction ledger, automated referee chasing with live chase status, server-side PDF reference reports, Postmark transactional email with webhook handling, hourly IMAP bounce processing, a scheduled health-watch job, a REST API, team accounts with invitations and roles, an admin oversight console, a GDPR data-handling layer, and a PWA with web push notifications.
This is the build we point founders and businesses with a software product in mind at when they ask what a complete SaaS build involves. See our custom CRM development page, web design for IT and software companies, or visit the case study archive for more examples.
A UK reference-checking platform built from scratch by Mako Digital. Employers and recruiters request employment references, the platform chases the referees automatically, and the completed reference comes back as a PDF report. It is sold pay-as-you-go from 99p per reference rather than on an annual contract, with credits bought through Stripe.
Yes. RefAssure is a complete product — sixteen application screens, Stripe billing with invoicing and a transaction ledger, automated email workflows, inbound email processing, PDF generation, a REST API, a PWA with push notifications, team accounts with roles, and an admin oversight console. See our custom CRM development page or the other platform builds in the case study archive.
Yes. RefAssure uses Stripe Checkout for credit purchases, with invoices, an invoice detail view and a transaction ledger built into the application. Customers buy credits and spend them per reference, which suits a pay-as-you-go product far better than a subscription. We build the billing model around how the business actually charges, not the other way round.
By treating deliverability as part of the architecture. RefAssure sends through the Postmark API with webhook event handling rather than server mail, processes bounces on an hourly IMAP job so dead addresses are detected instead of ignored, and runs a scheduled health-watch task over the pipeline. For a platform whose entire value is a message reaching a referee, none of that is optional.
It means building a large set of pages that each answer one specific, genuinely different search rather than one page trying to cover everything. RefAssure has 181 marketing pages — competitor comparisons, compliance guides, and sector clusters for warehouse, logistics and temp agency recruitment. It works when each page is genuinely useful and distinct. It fails when it is the same page with the town name swapped, which is why we write them properly.
Yes. RefAssure ships as a PWA with web push, so users install it from the browser and receive notifications on their phone with no App Store or Play Store submission, no review process and no store fees. For a B2B tool used by a known set of professional users, it is almost always the right call.
Platforms are scoped and priced individually — a product of this size is months of work, not weeks. What we can tell you early is whether the idea needs a full platform or whether a smaller build would prove the market first, which is usually the more useful conversation. Get in touch with what you have in mind.
Yes. RefAssure is a live UK reference-checking platform in commercial use, at refassure.co.uk. It is part of the same group as Mako Digital, which means we run it as an operating business as well as having built it — the roadmap is driven by real customers.
If RefAssure is the kind of work you have in mind, these are the closest peers in our portfolio — complete platforms, all built from scratch.
SaaS platforms are scoped and priced individually. Same approach as RefAssure — build the thing that actually solves the problem, price it so people can try it without a sales call, and build the search estate that brings them in.
