FFCheck

What it is

FFCheck.nl is our own product: a toolbox for people in the Netherlands who have to sort something out — a suspicious link, a fine, a flight that never left, a letter to a landlord — and do not want an app, an account or a subscription to do it. Every tool solves one problem, in Dutch, for how the Netherlands actually works. Free where it can be; a one-off price where a formal letter is involved. No ads, no tracking beyond anonymous statistics with consent, no "we'll be in touch".

We built it because we were tired of watching people get squeezed by apps, targeted by scams and ignored by institutions, and because a studio that sells websites should prove its ideas on itself first.

What it does

• Is Dit Veilig? — a real-time scam checker for websites, phone numbers and e-mail addresses, fed by URLhaus, Spamhaus, Google Safe Browsing and thousands of user reports. Type it in, get a verdict.
• Geldcheck — nineteen calculators across ten money topics: mortgage, tax, benefits, pension, investing, debt, car, running a business. Open data, information not advice.
• Mag Dit? and Bij Wie? — the everyday rules (barbecue on the balcony? fireworks? a drone?) with the real answer, and a finder that tells you which desk to call about a noisy neighbour or a lost parcel, with the phone number and what to say.
• PrivacyCheck, Klachten, EnergieCheck, BelastingCheck — hundreds of plain-language topics on privacy, energy and tax rights, plus letter generators: access and deletion requests, complaints, objections to the tax office, energy claims. Each letter cites the right articles and the escalation path, arrives as a PDF within a minute, and comes with a fix-it guarantee.
• Reisclaim — EU 261 flight-compensation claims drafted as a formal letter to the airline for a one-off fee, instead of a platform's commission on the payout.
• Vol Of Niet? and Wat Nu? — the Amsterdam corner: the nearest waste container that is not full, live from the city's data, and a 3D city dashboard with weather, incidents, transport disruptions and neighbourhood reports, refreshing every minute.

What we did

Everything. The name and the brand; the product decisions about what deserves a tool and what does not; the design system that makes eleven very different tools feel like one calm place; the engineering behind each one — threat-feed pipelines, the city's open-data APIs, the calculators, the letter generators with Stripe checkout and automatic PDF delivery, the live 3D map; and the writing: hundreds of topics in plain Dutch, checked against the actual law, with sources named and dated.

Then the search work, which is where a product like this lives or dies: a site structure that gives every rule, right and tool its own findable page, pillar pages for the questions people type most, sitemaps split by section, and the discipline to publish only what is true. It runs on WordPress with our own theme and our own plugins — nothing off the shelf, nothing that phones home.

Why it matters for your project

FFCheck is the argument for how we work, running in public. It shows we can take a fuzzy idea to a product people use without an account or a manual; that we can make data pipelines, payments and legal content behave in one interface; and that plain language and honesty are a design system, not a tone of voice. Its European sibling, FFCheck.eu, takes the same toolkit across 33 countries.

If you have a product idea that needs the same mix of design, engineering and words, we would like to hear it.