Our story · Founded 2016
We build tools you own.
Sem Kokhuis registered NowSquare in 2016. He has built products since 1999: at agencies, in an internet company he co-owned, on contracts for international firms, and in his own portfolio.
Why self-hosted
Every SaaS product you use is a dependency. The monthly bill buys access, and access ends when you stop paying, when the company shuts down, or when a new owner triples the price.
Self-hosted software removes that dependency. You install it once, on your server, and the code and the data are yours. If we shut down tomorrow, your installation keeps running.
We've watched businesses scramble when a platform they ran on changed its terms or disappeared. So we build tools you own. Self-hosting is the only model where your business does not depend on ours.
Why one PHP application
Ownership is a promise the architecture either keeps or breaks. Software that needs a container cluster, a message queue and someone on call belongs to whoever operates that infrastructure, whatever the licence says. You cannot own what you cannot operate.
So every self-hosted product here is one PHP application and one database. No Docker, no Kubernetes, no Redis, no Node.js on your server. Upload the files, point it at a database, and it runs, on a small VPS or on shared hosting. There are millions of PHP developers, and any one of them can open this code and take over. That is what makes the licence worth something.
It is an unfashionable way to build. It is also the only way we know to hand someone a system and mean it.
From agency to product studio
Sem worked at internet agencies, co-owned an internet company with around 400 customers, and contracted for international companies, some of them in Silicon Valley. Client projects shipped, and that was the last he saw of them. The products he owned kept improving, and they kept paying.
Today NowSquare builds its own products and takes on a few long-term partnerships. We build a product once and sell it to everyone who needs it, so revenue depends on the product being good.
Companies that want that product thinking on their own roadmap can work with us as an autonomous product development partner.
The timeline
The first product shipped in 1999: WAP sites for the mobile web, before smartphones existed. Then came mobile site generators, social platforms, loyalty systems, content management tools, e-commerce engines, and website builders. More than 20 shipped products in two decades. Some are archived now. The ones that lasted were simple, and they belonged to the people who used them.
The products in operation today:
Reward Loyalty. A self-hosted, white-label loyalty engine with points, stamps, tiers, and coupons. One installation serves unlimited brands, for marketing agencies that want to own their loyalty infrastructure.
InvoiceScript. Self-hosted invoicing for freelancers and small businesses: PDF invoices, payment QR codes, automated reminders. Your invoice data stays on your server.
VoxelBooking. An open-source, self-hosted booking system. Appointment scheduling and availability management, with the code and the customer data on your own server.
VoxelSite. An AI website builder. Describe your business and get a complete website in Tailwind CSS 4, as files on your server. Open source, self-hosted, one-time payment, BYOK (Bring Your Own API Key).
Stampify. Digital stamp cards that work in any browser: customers scan a QR code and collect stamps, with no app to download. Stampify is the exception in the portfolio; it runs as a hosted service.
The code for VoxelBooking and VoxelSite is public on GitHub, under AGPL-3.0. Read it before you buy anything.
NowSquare is registered in the Netherlands and based in the Eindhoven region. We build with Laravel, PHP, and Tailwind CSS. The idea: build something useful, and let the buyer own it.