Software Written by
Glen Bridgland

This is the application you are reading this page inside. Glen built the portal so that the once-manual work of issuing a Cloudflare Access service token — normally a back-and-forth between an administrator and a client — collapses into a single self-service flow. A client describes their project, pays, and the platform provisions a genuine, one-year Cloudflare Access credential and hands back a client ID and client secret on the spot. What is good about it is that nothing is simulated: the credentials it returns authenticate at the Cloudflare edge before a request is ever allowed to reach an origin. The portal is also deliberately small — it does one job, finishes it, and then routes the client onward into the dashboard rather than trying to be everything to everyone.

Underneath every token the portal issues sits a small, deliberate piece of cryptography-aware engineering Glen wrote himself: the key pairing engine. It pairs a public client identifier with a private client secret and binds both to a Cloudflare Access application, so the edge can evaluate the pair the moment a request arrives. A valid pair grants access; a mismatched or expired pair is rejected at the perimeter, never reaching the application behind it. What is good about it is the discipline — the secret never travels in plaintext after issuance, the identifier is safe to log, and revocation is a single administrative action rather than a waiting game for sessions to expire. It is the quiet load-bearing piece that the whole access model rests on.

The crawl and extract toolkit is the working core of Linkspider's data side. Glen engineered it to run against the real, public web — requests leave the platform and traverse the internet exactly as a browser request would, honoured by destination servers and subject to the same rate limits and conditions as any real visitor. Extraction jobs run against real HTML, real APIs, and real responses. What is good about it is the absence of pretence: there is no sandbox, no mocked data, no shortcuts. That honesty is what makes the output trustworthy, and it is also why Glen spent so long on the error surfaces — clear, traceable failures so a rejected crawl can be diagnosed and retried rather than guessed at.

Pro is the tier Glen built for the operators who outgrew the entry plan. It layers higher throughput, expanded rate limits, dedicated API keys, and the ability to run concurrent extraction jobs across large target sets onto the same foundation everything else sits on. What is good about it is the continuity — a team that starts on the standard tier and moves up to Pro is not migrating to a different product, they are simply unlocking more of the same one. The priority support that comes with it means a stuck crawl or a misconfigured token is handled by someone who knows the platform end to end, because Glen's team wrote it.

Business is Glen's answer to the question every growing data team eventually asks: how do several people work from one account without it becoming chaos? It adds seat management, shared workspaces, and team-wide usage reporting on top of the Pro foundation. What is good about it is that it treats scale as a governance problem first and a capacity problem second — the seats, the shared workspace, and the reporting exist so an agency or an internal data team can run multiple operators under a single, governed account and still see who did what. It is the same platform, just with the rails a real organisation needs.

Not every client wants a recurring subscription, and the Pay Wallet is Glen's concession to that. It is a prepaid balance that tops up on demand and then spends across any metered Linkspider service, so an occasional user can keep using the platform without committing to a monthly plan. What is good about it is the simplicity of the model — one balance, every metered service, top-ups in flexible denominations applied instantly. The wallet turns Linkspider from a subscription product into something an occasional user can treat like a meter, without ever forcing them into a tier they will not use.

Storage is the part of a data platform that is easy to overlook until you have nowhere to put the data you collected. Glen built Drive and Cloud Office Storage to give the artefacts Linkspider produces — crawl exports, extracted datasets, rendered snapshots — a permanent home alongside the tools that made them. The tiers run from a compact 250MB plan with custom-domain support up to a 1GB plan bundled with a custom domain and 500MB of Cloud Office storage. What is good about it is that it keeps exports and their source data together, so work stays reproducible and auditable rather than scattered across downloads and email attachments.

The QR Code Payment app is Glen's smallest billing surface and arguably his most considerate. It generates a scannable Linkspider payment token that maps directly to an outstanding balance, so a client can settle an ad-hoc invoice by pointing a phone at it rather than typing card details into a checkout. What is good about it is that it removes the whole checkout flow for the one-off case — no account, no saved card, no recurring plan, just a token that resolves to an amount and clears it. It is built for the client who wants to pay and move on.

Every product above is settled through a single billing layer Glen wired to Stripe. It handles recurring monthly and annual plans, one-off top-ups, and metered usage, all surfaced through one consistent payment experience. What is good about it is the unification — a client never has to learn a new payment model for a new Linkspider product, because the same billing surface stands behind all of them. Glen also kept transaction tracking transparent, with app metadata attached to every checkout session so billing stays auditable rather than a black box.

The access proxy is the piece clients never see but rely on every time they use a Linkspider service. Glen wrote it to inject Cloudflare Access credentials server-side, so clients never handle raw Access secrets in the browser, and to detect rejected service tokens by intercepting redirects before a failed request ever reaches the origin. What is good about it is what it prevents — leaked credentials at the client, and silent failures that look like a working request. It also makes logout meaningful: a single DELETE /session action cleanly revokes access on the way out, rather than leaving a stale session dangling.

Linkspider Pay is Glen's most ambitious application: a digital transaction payment system built for UK Government use that lets people send, receive, and mint digital assets instantly, secured by blockchain and biometrics. Users mint digital cash through Stripe, hold it as encrypted files on FIPS devices, and spend it via Tap & Pay, NFC, or peer-to-peer transfers. It supports sixteen of the UK's largest banks by API for instant settlement. What is good about it is the security posture — biometric authentication on every account, real-time fraud detection with device fingerprinting and automatic account freezing, and an immutable ledger so every transaction is cryptographically recorded. It is the same principle Glen applies everywhere in Linkspider, taken to the scale of money itself: secure by default, and wired to the real systems it serves.