Light tools for those who don't need a full portal

The situation

A large slice of Dutch SMBs sit at a scale where the well-known SaaS platforms just don't fit. Salesforce starts at around 25 euro per user per month for the Essentials tier and rises quickly the moment you want anything customised. HubSpot is free at the base, but a workable CRM flow soon means a paid tier.

For a freelancer or a team of five, the choice often becomes: an Excel of invoices, a free tier you keep hitting limits on, or a SaaS tool charging you four times what you actually use.

We build small custom tools for people who say: I don't want into the SaaS trap, I want something that works and that's mine.

What we did

Fixed-price engagements of two to three weeks, scope agreed up front.

Examples from our work:

**Invoicing tool with UBL and iDEAL.** Clients in a list, invoices with line items and VAT, PDF + UBL export, payment links via Stripe (iDEAL). Audit log of edits, automatic reminders for overdue invoices, fiscal-compliant sequential numbering.

**CRM without pipeline bullshit.** Clients, contacts, leads, a notes field. No mandatory deal stages you have to report on every week. Yes to search, filtering, a simple inbox link, and export to your accountant.

**Time tracking for freelancers.** Project and client, clock-in/out on your phone, a weekly list that flows into the invoicing tool. No feature creep toward a big HR system.

Each of these runs on Vercel + Neon Postgres, your own domain, hosting per user per month or a flat rate. Code in your own GitHub org, repo with Vectel as a collaborator while we maintain.

What it delivered

Different per client, the pattern is the same:

- Fixed price known up front (no hourly billing track). - Two to three weeks from first conversation to working tool. - No seat license scaling to 50 users while you have 4. - No migration pain when you want to tweak something two years out, because it's your code. - Hosting + maintenance with us at a workable monthly rate, or self-managed if the client prefers.

What this wasn't

Not a Bunq-style SaaS product with a pitch deck and a seed round. Not WordPress with thirty plugins. Not "we'll build a complete business operation for you" when you don't need it. What it was: a single tool of two to three weeks' work that solves your one problem and doesn't scale into things you don't need.