Why I Built Vond: One Sentence, Taken Apart
There is one sentence on the Vond homepage. It is mine, and it is the whole reason any of this exists:
I spent months hunting for a place in Amsterdam. A monthly subscription gave me the right to send messages. Half of them went into silence. Some of the listings, I am still fairly sure, never existed. To a Greek expat with no Dutch network, the market was a lottery behind a paywall. When I finally signed a lease, the sensible thing was to move on. I built what I had wanted instead. We are opening in Utrecht first: a rental market is local, and one city done properly is worth more than ten done vaguely.
People tend to read past it. It is a founder quote on a landing page; that is what founder quotes are for. But every clause in it is a specific, checkable complaint, and each one turned into a decision in the product. So here it is taken apart, clause by clause.
"I spent months hunting for a place in Amsterdam"
Months is the literal figure, and in either city an ordinary one.
I lived it in Amsterdam. We are opening in Utrecht first because a rental market is local, and Utrecht is where the numbers land hard right now. It has over 38,000 students at the university alone. The wait for an SSH student room runs over three years on SSH's own indication. Those two numbers, together, describe a market where looking for a room means refreshing listings at midnight for a season of your life.
What that does to you is subtler than the stress. It makes you accept things you would otherwise refuse. A viewing that clearly isn't a real viewing. A "fee" nobody explains. A landlord who wants a decision in four hours. Desperation is the market's most useful input, and everything built on top of it quietly depends on you staying desperate.
"A monthly subscription gave me the right to send messages"
This is the clause I still find hardest to say out loud without getting annoyed.
I was paying a monthly subscription for permission to send a message. What it bought was access to a text box, and nothing past it. On one of the big platforms that price is €39 per four weeks today, published on their own support pages (checked on 25 September 2026). I am not guessing at it, and I am not going to name them, because the number is the argument.
Do the arithmetic on a search that runs a season. Three months of paying to say hello is €117 at that rate, or €79 on their longest plan, spent by the person in the transaction with the least money and the least bargaining power, for no outcome at all. Meanwhile the people on the other side of the market, agents, insiders, anyone with a network, skip the box entirely.
That is the design decision at the centre of Vond, and it is not really a decision. Dutch law (art. 7:417 lid 4 BW) does not let a tenant be charged a mediation fee on a landlord's own listing. We go further than the law: a tenant pays Vond nothing, at any point. Landlords pay a flat success fee when a room is actually let, and nothing before that. The current figure is on our pricing page. A verhuurmakelaar charges a month's rent plus 21% btw, which on Utrecht's €775 median room is about €938. We are cheaper than the alternative and we are free to the person who has the least.
"Some of the listings, I am still fairly sure, never existed"
I sent careful messages about places I later became fairly certain did not exist.
There is no trick that fixes this, which is the uncomfortable part. Every platform that has tried to solve it with a badge has ended up making a claim it could not defend, and I have taken that badge off this site for exactly that reason, more than once. A green tick that means "we checked something, we won't say what" is worse than no tick, because it transfers the risk to you while looking like it removed it.
So at this stage we do the slow, unscalable thing. We speak to whoever is letting the place, and we build the listing with them, before it exists on the site at all. It is a phone call and an afternoon per room. It does not scale and there is no clever badge at the end of it.
What I will say precisely, because precision is the point: we do not verify identity, we do not check a register, and we do not claim to. We talk to a human being and we write down what is actually true about the room. The fact that this is a boast in 2026 tells you something about the market.
"no Dutch network"
I am Greek. I moved here without a Dutch family to vouch for me, without a colleague whose landlord had a room coming free, without the layer of quiet introductions that most successful searches actually run on.
That layer is the real product of the incumbent market, and it is invisible from outside. If you have it, the search takes a week. If you don't, you are in the public queue with everyone else, paying for the text box.
I cannot manufacture a network for anyone. What I can do is stop pretending the public queue is fair and stop charging admission to it.
"I built what I had wanted instead"
Four things I would tell anyone building something similar:
The interface is the easy part. Anyone can build a swipe feed in a fortnight. The expensive, unglamorous, actually-valuable work is being able to stand behind what is on the other side of the swipe.
Pick the fight you can win. We are a small team with no ad budget. We cannot out-spend anyone. We can be radically clearer and fairer on the one thing the incumbents are structurally bad at, because their revenue depends on being bad at it.
Ship the waitlist before the product. The most useful thing we did was put up a real waitlist and start asking people what the worst part was, before we had anything to show. The honest replies changed more about this product than any feature we could have built in the same weeks.
Bootstrapping is a feature. No outside money means nobody eventually arrives to explain why the tenant side needs a subscription after all. The model has to be honest because there is no one to answer to but the people using it.
Where this is now
Vond is pre-launch in Utrecht. The waitlist is live, and there is no ad budget, deliberately. If it is any good it should spread because it is useful.
If you have sat where I sat, paying a subscription to message a landlord who never replied, I would like you to be one of the first people through the door.
And if you are building something of your own here as an expat: it is hard, the bureaucracy is real, and it is worth it. Reach out, I read every message.
Panagiotis Pelardis is the co-founder of Vond, a direct way to rent in Utrecht that is free for tenants, always. This post reflects personal experience. For legal specifics on rental fees, consult Het Juridisch Loket or the gemeente's meldpunt Klacht over huren. An agency fee is not a Huurcommissie matter; it is reclaimed through the kantonrechter. If you have already paid an agency fee, our free reclaim-letter tool will tell you in four questions whether you were owed it back.