Crux Digits is an AI consultancy and software studio based in Nieuwegein, in the Utrecht region. Since 2022 we have built practical, production-grade AI for businesses across the Netherlands and Europe — from a fixed-price audit to a working system in production.
We saw too many AI projects stall on slide decks and pilots that never reached production. Crux Digits was founded to flip that: with a small, senior team of data scientists, ML engineers and strategists, we deliver AI that measurably works.
We work in fixed scope at a fixed price, with a single named expert as your point of contact — no surprises, no jargon. Every engagement is GDPR-aware and EU AI Act-conscious from day one.
AI audit & strategy, AI implementation, machine learning, computer vision, data engineering, LLM optimisation and application development — under one roof. Explore our services and case studies.
Audit €2,500 · Proof of Concept €20,000 · Production from €50,000. You know where you stand up front.
No ticket queue — one senior point of contact who knows your business and your data.
EU AI Act risk tiers and GDPR built in from day one, not bolted on at the end.
We ship working systems that run in production — not slides, but software.
Crux Digits is led by Tom Joseph, who heads the team of data scientists, engineers and strategists and stays the director-level point of contact on every engagement.
From our office in Nieuwegein, at the heart of the Utrecht region, we are close enough for on-site work across the Randstad — with short lines and a named expert who can come to you. Areas we serve include:
The phrase gets used loosely, so it helps to be concrete about what Crux Digits is and is not. We are a small, senior-led AI consultancy in Nieuwegein, in the province of Utrecht, founded in 2022 and incorporated as Crux Digits B.V. The people who scope your work are the people who build it. There is no layer of junior consultants writing decks that a separate offshore team later tries to turn into software, and no account manager standing between you and the engineers who understand your data.
That structure is a deliberate response to two gaps we kept seeing in the Dutch market. On one side sit the large enterprise consultancies — Xebia, Xomnia, Capgemini and their peers — who do serious work but price and staff it for organisations with seven-figure budgets and procurement departments. On the other side sit web and marketing agencies that rebranded as "AI" the moment large language models reached the headlines, wiring an API key into a chatbot and calling it a strategy. Crux Digits exists in the space between: enterprise-grade engineering discipline, delivered at a scale and price a mid-sized Dutch company can actually commit to.
Most of our clients are part of the Dutch MKB — the small and medium-sized enterprises that make up the bulk of the economy and rarely have an in-house data-science team. If you have a clear operational problem, real data, and a willingness to put a working system into production rather than admire a prototype, we tend to fit well. If you are looking for a 40-person delivery squad or a multi-year transformation programme, a larger firm is the honest answer, and we will say so.
What ties these groups together is impatience with theatre. They have usually sat through at least one AI pitch heavy on possibility and light on specifics, and they want the opposite: a clear scope, a number attached to it, and a person who will still be there when something breaks. That is the conversation we are built to have.
One reason AI projects stall is that they begin with ambition rather than scope. We invert that with a fixed, three-step ladder so you can decide at each stage whether the evidence justifies the next investment. Every price below is exclusive of VAT, with day-rate guidance of roughly EUR 150 per hour for work that falls outside a fixed step. The full breakdown lives on our pricing page.
We start small on purpose. For a fixed EUR 2,500 we map your data, your processes and the specific places where AI can earn its keep, then hand you a prioritised plan with realistic effort, risk and return estimates. You can take that document and execute it with anyone — the deliverable is genuinely yours. Plenty of clients use the audit purely to find out whether a project is worth doing at all, which is exactly what it is for.
The next step turns the most promising idea from the audit into a working proof of concept for a fixed EUR 20,000. This is where a model meets your real data and you see, on your own numbers, whether it performs. A proof of concept that fails honestly at this stage has saved you a far larger sum, and we would rather tell you that than push a doomed build into production. We are explicit about success criteria before we start, so the result is a clear yes or no rather than a hopeful maybe that drifts into a budget overrun.
When the proof of concept earns its place, we build the production system from EUR 50,000 — engineered, monitored, documented and handed over so your team can run and extend it. The defining outcome of this step is ownership: the solution belongs to you, with no dependency that locks you into paying us forever. You can read how this has played out across our case studies.
Building AI in the Netherlands and the wider EU is not the same as building it elsewhere, and treating compliance as an afterthought is how a promising system becomes a liability. At Crux Digits, the EU AI Act and the GDPR — the AVG in Dutch — are part of the design from day one, not a legal review bolted on once the code is written.
In practice that means we classify each use case against the AI Act's risk tiers early, so the obligations attached to a high-risk system are known before a line of model code is committed rather than discovered during an audit. It means data-protection thinking — lawful basis, minimisation, retention, the rights of the people in your dataset — shapes the data architecture, not just the privacy statement. For regulated sectors this is not optional polish; it is the difference between a system you can deploy and one your own legal team will block.
Larger organisations have compliance departments to absorb this work. A mid-sized company usually does not, which is precisely why getting it right early saves the most money. We would rather spend an extra conversation on data governance during the EUR 2,500 audit than rebuild a model later because it processed personal data it was never entitled to touch. This discipline runs through everything from our generative AI work to data engineering and computer vision.
Crux Digits has delivered 13 case studies since 2022, spanning healthcare, computer vision, natural-language processing and forecasting among other domains. Client names stay confidential — discretion is part of the service, and several of these systems sit close to sensitive operations — but the pattern across them is consistent: a clearly scoped problem, real data, a working system in production, and a client who owns the result.
Those projects draw on a deliberately broad engineering bench, kept under one roof so you are not stitching together three vendors to ship one system. Our core services are:
The industries we work across — healthcare, e-commerce, marketing, logistics and finance among others — share a common thread: each has processes where a well-built model removes repetitive judgement, reduces error, or surfaces patterns a person would never have time to find. In healthcare that might be triage support that respects strict data-protection rules; in logistics, demand forecasting that smooths a supply chain; in e-commerce, search and recommendation that lifts conversion. The technology differs, but the question is always the same — where does intelligence applied to your own data change a number you care about?
Plenty of capable AI talent works remotely from anywhere, so why does being a Dutch AI consultancy based in Nieuwegein, in the Utrecht region, matter? Partly proximity. From the heart of the Randstad we are within easy reach of Utrecht, Amsterdam, Rotterdam and the wider Benelux for the on-site sessions that genuinely benefit from a room and a whiteboard — the early scoping work, the awkward data conversations, the handover.
Partly it is context. A consultancy that operates inside the same regulatory and commercial environment as you understands the AVG, the AI Act, Dutch procurement habits and the realities of the MKB without needing them explained. And partly it is accountability: a registered Dutch company at Vlierhoeve 100 in Nieuwegein, led by a named founder, is straightforward to verify, contract with and hold to its word.
Crux Digits is founded and led by Tom Joseph, who serves as Managing Director and stays the director-level point of contact on every engagement. That is not a figurehead arrangement. The senior people involved at the start remain involved through delivery, which is how knowledge about your business stays inside the project instead of leaking out every time a junior consultant rotates off. It is a smaller promise than a global firm can make about headcount, and a larger one about continuity and care.
The most useful thing about the way Crux Digits is structured is that you can test it cheaply. You do not have to take a position on whether AI will transform your business; you have to decide whether one well-defined problem is worth a EUR 2,500 audit. Everything after that is earned by evidence, step by step, with the option to stop at any point and keep what you have already paid for.
If that approach fits how you prefer to make decisions, the next move is a short conversation. Tell us the process you want to improve and the data you have, and we will tell you honestly whether AI is the right tool and where it would pay off first. You can browse the full range of services, compare the fixed steps on the pricing page, or reach Tom and the team directly at info@cruxdigits.nl or on +31 6 44384676. There is no obligation in a first call, and you will leave it knowing more about your own opportunity than when you started.
If you have read this far, the essentials to remember about Crux Digits are simple. We are an AI consultancy Nieuwegein companies can sit across a table from, and an AI consultancy Utrecht region businesses choose when they want enterprise-grade engineering without the enterprise invoice. The model is a fixed three-step ladder — a EUR 2,500 audit, a EUR 20,000 proof of concept, then a production build from EUR 50,000 — so the financial commitment always tracks the evidence in front of you. The people stay constant from first scope to final handover, the compliance work with the AI Act and the AVG starts on day one, and the system you pay for ends up genuinely yours. That is the whole proposition, and the cheapest way to test it is a single audit on one real problem.
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