Software studio · Roeselare, Belgium

Taking on new work

Software your business can actually run on.

I am Bartel. Through Rascals I design and build web applications for international businesses — invoicing, stock, ticketing, contracts, webshops. The kind where the numbers have to be right, and where someone has to be able to explain them a year later.

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years building for the web: 15+ years building for the web
platforms shown here: 4 platforms shown here
person you talk to: 1 person you talk to

Selected work

Four platforms, four different kinds of hard.

Three of these are products of my own and one was built for a client. They are here because each one had a problem that could not be solved by adding another screen.

Own product 2026 — now

Stuart

A modular platform that manages anything.

One core, a handful of replaceable packages, and an application that never has to be forked to fit the next customer.

Composer packages: 5 Composer packages
admin modules: 13 admin modules
core edits to add one: 0 core edits to add one

Laravel 12 Livewire 3 Tailwind CSS MySQL Laravel Cashier Docker

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Own product 2026 — now

Usher

Ticketing that is honest about the money.

A multi-organiser ticket platform where the fee is stated, the currency belongs to the event, and the receipt never changes after the fact.

per ticket, all-in: 3% + € 0,50 per ticket, all-in
currencies on one page: 2 currencies on one page
split at the moment of sale: 0 split at the moment of sale

Laravel 13 Livewire 4 Flux UI Stripe Connect Cashier Redis

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Own product 2026 — now

Clark

The clerk: writes the invoice, keeps the record, sends it out.

Belgian B2B invoicing over Peppol — UBL 2.1 and EN 16931, validated against the official rule set before anything leaves the building.

Laravel 13 Livewire 3 UBL 2.1 EN 16931

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Client work 2022 — now

Best Tarief Office

Nine energy and telecom providers, one form.

A contract platform for a Belgian broker: one intake, nine providers' real PDF forms filled, signed with eID and pushed into the CRM.

Laravel 10 Vue 3 Horizon PDFtk

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All work

What I do

The whole thing, not a slice of it.

From the first conversation to the server it runs on. There is no hand-off to a second agency halfway through, because that is where the details go missing.

01

A web application, from nothing

The full path: working out what it actually has to do, modelling the domain properly, building it, and putting it on a server that stays up. Laravel and Livewire, because a small team maintaining one codebase beats a large one maintaining three.

02

Rescuing what already exists

An application nobody dares deploy, a developer who has moved on, a framework four versions behind. I take it over, get a test suite and a deployment under it, and make the next change boring again.

03

E-invoicing and Peppol

Structured invoicing that passes the official rule set — UBL 2.1, EN 16931, validated against the same artefacts the receiving Access Point runs. Either as an application of its own, or fitted into the one you have.

04

Payments and subscriptions

Stripe done properly: webhooks as the source of truth, idempotent handling, refunds thought through before launch rather than after the first one. Marketplaces and payouts with Connect where money passes between parties.

05

Integrations and automation

The work that removes an afternoon from somebody's week: a CRM that fills itself, provider PDFs generated and signed, documents filed where they belong, mail that goes out on time and can be resent.

06

Webshops, on the platform that fits

Next to Laravel there is Magento, Shopify, WordPress and WooCommerce — standard work here, not a favour on the side. Building a shop, taking a neglected one over, or wiring the one you have into the stock, invoicing and shipping systems it should have been talking to all along.

07

Hosting and staying alive

Docker for development, a scripted release for production, backups that have actually been restored at least once. Plus somebody to call when the thing you depend on stops behaving.

More about services

How I work

Four things I will not trade away.

You own everything

The code lives in your repository, under your account, under a licence you can read. Nothing is rented back to you and nothing stops working if we stop working together. That is not generosity, it is the only honest way to sell software.

Boring where it counts

Money, identity and anything with a legal record gets the dull, well-trodden approach. I would rather spend the interesting ideas on the part of your business that is genuinely unusual.

The words matter

A screen that says "unpaid" when it means "past due date" sends somebody chasing a customer who already paid. Naming things accurately is not polish applied at the end; it is most of the work.

Small, on purpose

You talk to the person who writes the code. No account manager relaying a question, no junior handed the difficult screen, no invoice for a meeting about a meeting.

Working with

A deliberately small stack, known deeply.

Fashion is expensive to maintain. I use tools that will still be supported when your application is five years old, and I know them well enough to get out of their way.

PHP 8.3 Laravel Livewire MySQL PostgreSQL Redis Horizon Blade Tailwind CSS Alpine Vue 3 Vite Stripe Cashier Connect Peppol UBL 2.1 EN 16931 Docker GitLab CI Hetzner DigitalOcean AWS S3 Mailgun Magento Shopify WordPress WooCommerce PrestaShop REST APIs GraphQL PDFtk Meilisearch

Have something that needs building?

Tell me what it is in a few lines. You get a real answer from me — whether I am the right fit, roughly what it would take, and what I would do first. No obligation and no sales sequence.

Start a project Or just send an email

Taking on new work