UK number plates are quietly serious property. A good one can be worth more than the car it’s on, retention certificates expire on dates owners don’t remember, and the values shift with a market most people only check once a year. For most collectors the answer is a spreadsheet. It works until a retention quietly lapses, until you find out the plate you thought was worth eight grand hasn’t moved in three years, until a buyer asks for a valuation and you’ve got nothing to send them.
There wasn’t a tool that handled UK plates properly – DVLA-backed checks, real valuations, retention tracking, documents in one place. What existed was either a generic history check site that ignored the asset side, or an amateur tool that didn’t take the data seriously. So we built it. Platefolio runs as a live SaaS product with paying users – hobbyists, collectors and dealers – managing their portfolios, renewals, valuations, vehicle checks and sale listings through a single dashboard.
The result is a collector who looks organised because the platform makes them organised. Retention renewals get flagged before they expire. MOT and tax pull automatically from the DVLA and DVSA. Valuations come from a scoring engine that understands what UK buyers actually pay for, with a community layer for a second opinion. Vehicle checks return a full DVLA/DVSA history with a downloadable PDF report. Documents – certificates, V750s, receipts – live encrypted in the cloud instead of a desk drawer. The admin that used to eat weekends now happens in the background.
How we built and run it The core platform is PHP and MySQL – fast to ship, easy to maintain. Vehicle data pulls from the official DVLA and DVSA APIs over OAuth2, every lookup logged. PDF reports are generated on AWS Lambda using headless Chrome so heavy renders never block the dashboard. Documents sit in encrypted S3 buckets and sensitive fields are AES-256 encrypted at the application layer. Email goes through AWS SES, SMS through AWS SNS, payments through Stripe (subscriptions plus one-off vehicle checks at £9.50). Auth supports Google OAuth and email/password with optional SMS 2FA. Background cron jobs send retention reminders and digests – the proactive nudges that used to need a human paying attention.
Platefolio is live at platefolio.co.uk with paying customers using it daily for portfolio management, valuations and DVLA-backed vehicle checks. It’s a working example of how we approach product work: identify a real problem, build something that solves it properly, run it reliably.