Peil is a fast working tool and financial compass for Dutch freelancers (ZZP). Log hours fast and invoice them in a click. See instantly what you actually keep, what to set aside, and how many months of safety net you have.
A startup from Hoofddorp, the Netherlands that is founded by Jeroen Kortekaas, Ioanna Fourtouna.
This page is designed to help you find out whether Peil is good and if it is the right choice for you.
A billed rate of €85 an hour ex VAT sounds fine – but after your non-billable hours, costs and tax, what you actually keep can be closer to €50. That's the number you make decisions on, and most freelancers never see it. Peil works it out: log your hours in an Excel-like grid, invoice in a few clicks straight from those hours, and instantly see your net-effective hourly rate, what to set aside, and how many months of safety net you have.
Peil is built for speed: you log hours in an Excel-like grid with drag, paste and keyboard shortcuts, and create invoices by the shortest route, for example by simply selecting the hours to bill. On top of that Peil applies the Dutch tax rules and shows you where you stand: your net-effective hourly rate (what actually survives per hour worked, after tax and after setting aside for disability insurance, pension and buffer), your take-home room, your tax share of revenue, and your safety net – how many months you'd last on your reserves. In the Financial Lab you model scenarios: a higher rate, fewer hours, or a comparison with employment. Peil isn't a full accounting suite and for many freelancers it doesn't need to be: you see your position clearly all year, and hand clean data to your accountant (or your own BTW-aangifte) when it's time to file.
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Net-effective rate (NER)
€85 an hour sounds fine, but after your non-billable hours, costs and tax, what's actually left is often about half. The NER is that real number, the one to price and plan on, and almost no freelancer sees it. Peil works it out from your own data and keeps it current.
Financial Lab
Test the decisions you actually face: what if you raised your rate, worked fewer hours, or took on that retainer? About a dozen inputs (rate; your billable, non-billable, fixed and retainer hours; business costs; AOV; pension; tax reserve; buffer) all feed one Dutch tax projection engine, so every section recomputes live as you change a number and you watch take-home, tax and safety net move together.
Economic Waterfall
See where every euro goes, from gross revenue down through business costs, tax (IB, PVV, ZVW) and your reserves to what you actually take home. It makes the drop from headline rate to reality legible, and it is the source the rest of the Lab builds on.
Safety Net
Your real worry isn't this month, it's the dry spell. Safety net turns your reserves into time: how many months you'd last if income stopped, and how a drop in revenue changes that. Vague worry becomes a number you can act on. Works on its own, too.
Employment Comparison
Every freelancer wonders whether to just take a salaried job. Peil shows the gross salary your freelance take-home actually equals, so you can compare like for like at the moment you're deciding instead of guessing. Works on its own, too.
Tax projection and reserving
Know what you'll owe before the bill arrives. Peil projects your income tax and tells you what to set aside each month for tax, AOV, pension and buffer, so the aanslag is never a shock.
Excel-speed Hour Logging
Logging hours elsewhere takes three or more clicks per entry, so people skip it and then can't bill accurately. Peil's grid works like a spreadsheet, with drag, paste, keyboard and remembered activities, so a week of hours takes seconds and nothing slips through unbilled.
Invoice from your Hours
This closes the gap where freelancers lose money and evenings. Select the hours from your dashboard or timesheet, and Peil builds the whole invoice (client, lines, totals) in one step, with a live PDF preview.
Invoice design and branding
Send something that looks like your brand instead of a default template. Four lay-out templates, plus control over typography, colour, logo and layout, all without a separate design tool.
Recurring Invoices
Retainers and repeat work bill themselves. Set it up once and Peil generates the invoice on schedule, so you never forget to send it.
Automated Payment Reminders
Chasing late payers is awkward and easy to put off, which is exactly why freelancers get paid late. Peil sends reminders on the schedule you set, in your own wording, and stops the moment an invoice is paid.
Invoice Reconciliation Tracking
Answers the "did that one actually get paid?" question. Every invoice's status is tracked, from sent to viewed, paid or overdue, and online payments mark themselves paid, so your overdue list and your runway reflect real cash instead of manual ticking.
Client Portal
Clients view and pay their invoices on a clean, branded page at your own link, with no account and no digging through email. That gets you paid faster.
Online Payments (Mollie)
Put a "Pay now" button on your invoices and portal, with the money landing in your own Mollie account. Less friction between invoice and payment means a shorter wait.
Dutch Tax Engine
Urencriterium tracking, KOR, startersaftrek and 2026 figures are all modelled in, so the rules that decide what you owe make your numbers right without you becoming a tax expert.
Free API & MCP Integration
No lock-in and no busywork. A free API and MCP server let you, or an AI assistant, log hours, draft invoices and read your position programmatically, and connect Peil to the tools around it.
Data Export & Import
Export everything as CSV or JSON, and delete your account in one click. You can leave with all your data whenever you want.
Privacy-First Design
Cookieless, anonymous analytics, no ad trackers, and EU hosting. Your financial data is yours and isn't sold.
Bilingual Support
Fully available in Dutch and English.
Themes
Different color themes all with light and dark support.
Existing tools handle compliance. Peil handles understanding. Most freelancers can see their revenue but not what it means: a rate is not income, revenue is not an equivalent salary, and the balance in your account does not tell you your runway. Financial anxiety comes from that gap, the illegibility between the numbers and their meaning. Peil closes it by connecting the work directly to a legible position. You log an hour, send an invoice, mark it paid, and each act is also a reading: your net-effective rate, the tax to set aside, the months of runway you have, all updating as you go. Action and orientation become the same motion, so you always know where you stand without stopping to measure.
Dutch self-employed professionals (ZZP'ers): consultants, developers, designers, writers, mostly solo and service-based, part of 1.2 million in the Netherlands and some 26 million across Europe. They are smart and busy, and often a little tense about money, because real things ride on it: the mortgage, the pension, the quiet question of whether this is sustainable. The system has grown too complex for rules of thumb (the self-employed tax deduction alone has fallen from about €6,000 to €1,200 since 2022), so guessing no longer works. They invoice by the hour or on retainer, do their own admin, and want to understand what they truly earn and whether they are safe, without becoming an accountant.
Peil is built by founders who own the problem. They were tired of two things: clunky per-entry tools that made logging hours and invoicing a chore, and never really knowing what an hour of work was worth once tax and everything set aside were taken off. The workaround was a spreadsheet, faster than the software but still blind to the numbers that mattered. Peil grew from a simple wish: keep that speed, and let the real picture rise out of the work instead of arriving as a quarterly reckoning. The name carries it. 'Peil' in Dutch is a level or a gauge, a 'peiling' is a reading of your position so you can choose a course, and 'peil houden' means keeping afloat what could otherwise slowly sink. That is what the tool is for.
Python and FastAPI on the backend, React (with MUI and Vite) on the front end, and PostgreSQL for data. Invoices are rendered by a Typst-based PDF service, and the app is fully bilingual in Dutch and English. It runs in Docker on EU infrastructure (Hetzner). Payments go through Mollie and email through Resend, with a free API and an MCP server for automation.
Two reasons, one practical and one deeper. Practically, the daily work is faster: hours go into a spreadsheet-style grid, and an invoice is a click from the hours you select. Deeper: Peil makes your value legible. It shows what you actually keep per hour, often less than half of what you invoice, the number most freelancers never see and the one that lets you price your work and state your worth without doubt. Peil is not a full accounting suite, and for most freelancers it does not need to be. Bookkeeping records where you have been. Peil shows you where you stand and where you are heading, and hands clean data to your accountant when it is time to file.
We have collected here some useful links to help you find out if Peil is good.
Check the traffic stats of Peil on SimilarWeb. The key metrics to look for are: monthly visits, average visit duration, pages per visit, and traffic by country. Moreoever, check the traffic sources. For example "Direct" traffic is a good sign.
Check the "Domain Rating" of Peil on Ahrefs. The domain rating is a measure of the strength of a website's backlink profile on a scale from 0 to 100. It shows the strength of Peil's backlink profile compared to the other websites. In most cases a domain rating of 60+ is considered good and 70+ is considered very good.
Check the "Domain Authority" of Peil on MOZ. A website's domain authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). It is based on a 100-point logarithmic scale, with higher scores corresponding to a greater likelihood of ranking. This is another useful metric to check if a website is good.
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