A free platform, built out of
frustration and good maps.

I am an ex-Australian Defence Force member and I now work full-time in Geographic Information Systems, which is the discipline of using spatial data and maps to solve real-world problems. My day job involves building tools that help people understand the world through geography.

When my partner and I started looking for our wedding venue, I kept thinking: this is a spatial problem. Where is it relative to our guests? Is it near the ceremony location? How far is the drive after midnight? These questions cannot be answered by a list. They require a map. So I built one.

What started as a personal project became something more considered when I looked at what venues were being charged to appear on the platforms we were using. The numbers did not reflect the cost of running the software. They reflected the value of the audience being sold back to the people who created it.

The internet has made discovery infrastructure genuinely cheap. A platform like this costs roughly $50 to $70 per month to operate. The major wedding venue directories in Australia charge venues anywhere from $150 to $500 per month for a standard listing, and up to $1,500 per month for featured placement. Those fees are not covering costs. They are covering revenue targets. The couple searching for a venue is not the customer in that model — they are the product.

Taylor's Venues inverts that. Venues are listed because they exist, not because they paid. Couples use it because it is genuinely useful, not because it is the only option with any coverage.

That is not a marketing position. It is just arithmetic.

A single venue on a competitor platform pays more in one month than it costs to run Taylor's Venues for an entire year.