Custom software built from Haarlem

Haarlem is our home base, not the edge of our working area. When building software, physical proximity mainly counts in two phases: discovery, where we want to see the process in the place it currently breaks and with the people working in it daily, and handover, where your administrator or in-house developer walks through the environment. For clients in Kennemerland and the Amsterdam region we schedule those moments on site without charging travel time. The sprints in between are location-independent: the same developers, the same two-week rhythm, only the reviews over video. That is why we build just as well for a client in Brabant or Groningen as for the neighbours; Haarlem is not a condition in the proposal but a practical advantage.

We work with three realistic ranges. A compact internal tool or a customer portal sits between 15,000 and 35,000 euros. A first version of a new product falls between 25,000 and 60,000 euros. A full platform with billing, team accounts and dashboards runs from 60,000 to 150,000 euros. Maintenance afterwards runs on a retainer from 2,500 euros per month. Where you land inside a range depends on the number of user roles, the integrations and how unusual your business logic is. The work is done in Haarlem by senior developers rather than offshore, which explains both the rate and the rework you are not paying for. You usually get a first indication within 24 hours, or fill in the calculator at /calculator.

Three kinds of work make up most of our projects: customer portals where your clients see their own orders, documents and invoices; internal web applications and dashboards that lift a process out of Excel and the inbox; and integrations between systems that currently do not talk to each other. You can read more about those forms at /webapplicatie-laten-bouwen and /software-koppelingen. What we do not do are standalone marketing websites or WordPress maintenance; Haarlem has better parties for that.

We usually schedule an intro within a week. After sign-off, discovery typically starts within two to three weeks and building begins about a month after the first conversation. We deliberately keep room in the planning for existing clients, so we would rather tell you honestly that a start date shifts by three weeks than pick up a project half-heartedly. If you have a hard deadline, for example an audit, a trade fair or the end of a licence contract, mention it in the first conversation. Then we decide together whether it is feasible before there is a proposal.

The first conversation takes about an hour and can take place at our office in Haarlem, at your location or over video. Visiting is always welcome; the coffee is ready and it helps to see who you will be working with. We ask about the process that is failing today, who will work in the software and what budget and timeline you have in mind. You do not need to bring a functional specification: a sketch on paper and access to the people doing the work are enough. By the end you know whether we are a fit, including when the answer is no.

Yes, and it is one of the reasons we are based in Haarlem. Amsterdam-West and the Zuidas, Hoofddorp, Schiphol-Rijk, Heemstede, Bloemendaal, Velsen and Zandvoort are around half an hour away, usually by train. For those clients we plan physical reviews as a fixed part of the project rhythm instead of as an exception. The practical difference with a Zuidas agency: the same level of seniority and the same stack, at a rate that is not built around office rent and account management.

A freelancer is often cheaper per hour and fine for well-scoped work, but is a single point of failure: illness, a busy week or a new client and your project stalls. A large agency absorbs absence, but you talk to an account manager while juniors build, and lead time and overhead add up. We sit in between: a small senior team where two people know every project, you talk to the people who build, and everything is documented so a successor can take over. That last point is the real difference with a freelancer.

We do that regularly. We start with a technical audit of a few days: we read the codebase, review database and infrastructure and test what actually works. You then get a report on what can be kept, what needs rebuilding and roughly what the remaining road to a working version costs. Sometimes continuing on the existing base is sensible, sometimes rebuilding one part is cheaper than fighting symptoms for a year. You are free to take that report to another party; it is your property and not tied to a follow-up assignment.

Both, depending on how sharp the scope is. A fixed price works well for well-scoped work whose end result can be described up front: a discovery, a design phase, or an integration with a system that has decent documentation. For a complete platform a fixed price is false certainty: either scope grows while the price does not, or quality is cut to stay within budget. There we work with two-week sprint budgets and an agreed ceiling, so you see per sprint where the money goes and can stop or change direction without a discussion.

You own everything we build specifically for you. At delivery we schedule a handover session, usually at our office or at your table, where we walk through the repository, the infrastructure and the documentation with the person or party taking over management. Repositories live in your own GitHub organisation, hosting and databases on your own accounts. That is not only a contractual arrangement: in a region where clients know each other, the easiest way to be recommended is a client who could leave without us and chooses not to.

For Dutch SMEs processing personal data we arrange three things as standard: a data processing agreement, hosting inside the EU and logging of who viewed or changed which data. On top of that we limit in the design which fields we record and which role may see what, because data minimisation is engineering work and not something for a privacy statement afterwards. In healthcare, education and financial services we tighten encryption, retention periods and access. We are not lawyers: for a DPIA or an assessment of your legal basis we work alongside your own adviser.

Every engagement consists of phases with a closing moment, and after each phase you decide whether to continue. If you stop in between, you receive what has been built up to that point, including source code, documentation and access to the environments. There is no notice period of months and no licence that expires when the collaboration ends. That is deliberate: it forces us to deliver something in every phase that already has value on its own.