ReviewFlow

Context

Small UK businesses want more Google reviews and most tools in the category get them the same way: ask for a rating first, send the happy customers to Google and divert the rest into a private form. That is review gating. It is prohibited by Google’s policy, by the UK Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, and by the US Federal Trade Commission. I wanted a product I could defend line by line.

What I built

ReviewFlow lets a business add a customer, by hand, CSV, QR code or a walk-in prize wheel, and schedules a WhatsApp message with SMS fallback. Every customer gets the same two links: leave a Google review, or tell the manager privately. The original build had sentiment routing. I removed it, then commissioned a read-only audit of my own code that cited a file and line for every claim and labelled the things the code did not do as not found. It caught one leftover: the API still computed a rating-based routing value that nothing used. I removed that too.

• Data store
• Model or agent
• Check or gate
• Person
• External service

Consent is an append-only record storing the exact wording each person saw. Data subject requests are self-serve, and erasure anonymises in place while deliberately preserving the opt-out, because suppression has to survive deletion. The content security policy is all-self, fonts are self-hosted, logs are redacted, and the whole thing runs on one small machine in London for a few pounds a month.

Outcome

Deployed on a custom domain with over a hundred automated tests, an end-to-end run of 27 checks passed, and multiple security reviews with no exploitable findings. Twenty-three industry presets. Production WhatsApp sending awaits Meta business verification, and there are no paying customers yet, so I make no claims about volume.

What I’d do differently

Research the compliance position before building, not after; gating went in and came out. Ship a consent gate, not just a consent record, because evidence without enforcement is the first thing a regulator asks about. And start the third-party approvals on day one. Meta, Google Business Profile and Stripe approvals are multi-week lead times that gated launch long after the code was finished.