Frequently asked
Cost, timelines, what we build and what we refuse to. Every answer here is the same one you would get on a call, written down so you do not have to book one to hear it.
99six comes from 996: 9 to 9, six days a week. For us it is not a work policy but a stance: the willingness to push work further when there is still value left to create. The name is the opposite of the 9-to-5 default of doing what is expected and going home. The philosophy behind it: software should give back more than it takes.
99six was founded by Aljereau Marten and Mike Yan. Aljereau handles strategy, design and front-end, mapping how a business runs, deciding what to build, and designing every screen and interaction. Mike is a senior site reliability engineer who owns the back end and infrastructure: architecture, APIs, deployment, uptime. Both sit in on every project from the first call to the last deploy, so there's no handover between the person who understood the problem and the person who builds it.
A dev shop. Everything on the Services page is something 99six has built and still maintains. Aljereau and Mike are co-founders with fixed roles, strategy/design and back-end/infrastructure, and both work every project end to end, so you talk to the people doing the work.
99six is based in the Netherlands, Aljereau in Rotterdam and Mike in The Hague, and works with clients across Europe. Our client work so far is for Dutch small and mid-size businesses: a renovation contractor, a bathroom showroom, a grid-congestion service, and a CRM for a contractor group that is in build. It's a small team on purpose: you get direct contact with the people building, and every client gets the whole team rather than whoever happens to be free.
Custom software starts from €12,500 for an internal tool or a custom CRM, and from €35,000 for a platform that runs the whole operation, excl. BTW. Where yours lands follows scope. A free one-to-two week discovery maps what exists, what's needed and the data model, and what comes out is a fixed proposal, not an estimate that grows. A typical custom software project then runs 8 to 12 weeks to a version your team is actually using. If a build wouldn't pay for itself, that gets said before you're quoted a number at all.
Fixed price, not hourly. Scoping happens first, about a week of mapping what exists, what's needed and what it costs, and what comes out is a fixed proposal, not an estimate that can quietly grow as the project runs. The point is knowing the number before the work starts, not watching a clock for months after saying yes.
Buy for anything generic, like email, accounting or payroll, where someone else has already solved it better than you'd build it. Build when your process is the actual advantage, when the business runs across five tools and a WhatsApp group, or when you've bought twice already and both times ended in spreadsheets on the side. Most real answers land as a hybrid: keep the generic tools, build the thin layer that connects them and holds the logic that's yours.
An off-the-shelf CRM comes with strong opinions about how your sales process should work; a custom one is built around how it really works. Signs the off-the-shelf version has lost: deal stages that don't match reality, custom fields nobody fills in, a spreadsheet next to the CRM that's the real source of truth. A custom CRM is usually a small system with your real pipeline and objects, like a job or a shipment, wired into the tools you keep, rather than a Salesforce rebuild.
A few tells: a spreadsheet living "next to" the official system that's the real source of truth, deal stages or fields that don't match how work really moves, and data getting retyped by hand between tools that should talk to each other. Another is paying per seat for software only a fraction of which gets used. If off-the-shelf keeps doing 70% of what you need and fighting you on the other 30%, that's the gap custom software is built to close.
Internal platforms like CRM, planning, quoting and client portals, built around how you actually work, plus B2B and B2C products taken from MVP to production. Also integrations with the systems you can't replace, and the boring-but-essential layer underneath all of it: auth, roles, hosting, backups, monitoring. Recent examples include a CRM for a contractor group, client portals, and Umon, 99six's own B2C/B2B platform. If a problem doesn't fit any of that, they'll say so rather than force it.
Often, yes, if it already runs one business well. We start with an audit of the code and the data, including a security check, because apps built fast with AI tools often leave keys in the code or skip login checks. Then we split what every business needs from what only yours needs, give each business its own walled-off data, and make payments, accounting and messaging swappable. It's a product when a second business runs on it without code changes.
Start with the one that's boring, frequent and rule-based, not the one that annoys you most. Start with data that gets retyped by hand, like orders from email into a system or invoice lines into accounting: pure loss, and the easiest win. Reports assembled by hand every week come next, then routing and triage, then AI-drafted replies a human approves. Leave anything that happens twice a year, or that's really part of a client relationship, alone. Automate the work behind it, not the relationship itself.
A first automation starts from €3,500: the audit plus your first flow live. Connecting tools that don't talk to each other starts from €3,000, an assistant for one job from €4,500, and keeping it running from €250/month. All excl. BTW. The rest follows the size of the workflow: a short audit maps the repetitive tasks and picks what's worth automating first, then you get a fixed proposal before any building starts. Most first automations reach production in four to eight weeks. A 30-minute call gets you the number for yours, and a yes or a no.
Just the repetitive parts. Every automation keeps a human approving the decisions that matter: AI drafts a reply or a quote, a person signs off, never the other way round. The stated rule is to automate the work behind a relationship, never the relationship itself: the twelve questions someone answers every week, not the judgment calls a client experiences as care. The aim is hours back and fewer errors, not fewer people.
Ask what it costs per month to NOT have it, in hours spent, errors made and things that fall through, rather than only what it cost to build. Once an automation is live it should keep proving itself: the process's own Monitor stage runs it in production and sends a monthly note on what it did and saved, so the number isn't a guess made once at the start and never checked again.
SEO gets a page ranked. AEO, answer engine optimisation, gets it quoted when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google's AI Overviews a question you should be the answer to. The difference matters because a growing share of searches now end without a click: the engine answers and the person never visits a site at all. AEO rewards direct answers near the top of the page, clear structure, verifiable facts and schema markup: the same craft as good SEO, aimed at a reader that's a machine first.
Start from the questions your customers actually ask, pulled from sales calls and support tickets rather than a keyword tool, and answer each one plainly in the first two sentences before going deeper. Add FAQ, Organization and Service schema so an engine doesn't have to guess what the page is about. Then check what ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI say about you today, and fix what they get wrong. It's writing clearly for a reader that happens to be a machine first.
An SEO and AEO audit starts from €1,250, credited if you build with us. Monthly growth after it starts from €950/month. Both excl. BTW. The audit ends in a fixed proposal rather than an open-ended retainer. On timing: SEO and AEO results compound over three to six months, and anyone promising faster is usually selling ads instead. If you're building or rebuilding a site anyway, the site's own stance is to do it right from the start rather than bolt SEO on later. A 30-minute call gets you the number for your situation.
Plan on three to six months before results compound. That's the timeline, and anyone promising faster is usually selling ads, not doing SEO. The process itself starts faster: a one-week audit of technical health and what AI assistants currently say about you, two to three weeks on structural foundations like speed and schema, then four to eight weeks writing service and location pages with real substance. After that it's measured monthly: rankings, AI citations and, the one that matters, leads.
After the intro call (30 minutes), scope follows, about a week of it, ending in a fixed proposal rather than an estimate that grows. Build comes next: two to eight weeks with a weekly demo of working software, so you can say what to change while changing it is still cheap. Shipping happens on day one, with the team staying close while it settles in. After launch we keep it running on a monthly plan, and improving further is optional: measuring what changed and extending what worked.
We do. A website runs on our Run plan, from €400/month: hosting, updates, daily backups, uptime monitoring and up to two hours of changes a month, with a short monthly note on what changed. A live automation runs from €250/month, which covers its hosting and model costs, monitoring, and fixes when a connected tool changes. Custom software gets its own plan, agreed together with the fixed price. All excl. BTW.
4 to 12 weeks from first call to launch, depending on the service. A website typically launches 6 to 8 weeks out, custom software reaches a version your team is using in 8 to 12 weeks, and a first automation usually reaches production in 4 to 8 weeks. The shape is the same across all three: a 30-minute intro call, about a week of scoping into a fixed proposal, then a build phase with weekly demos. You see it running throughout.
Last reviewed 2026-10-04