Findify didn't start as a company. It started as a bot for one person
It began with an €80 subscription I refused to pay for. Then I built a Telegram bot in 24 hours - on my birthday. That bot became Findify.
2022-2023
€80 a month
I'm Ukrainian. I came to the Netherlands as a refugee in 2022 and stayed with my parents. I thought it would be temporary.
By 2023, it was time to move out. I was willing to go anywhere: Groningen, Maastricht - it didn't matter. I just had to find a place.
It turned out that finding a home here isn't just about looking - it's about being the first to apply. A listing is published, and an hour later forty people have already applied. I needed alerts for the entire country, and I found a service that could do it. Eighty euros a month.
I looked at the price and thought: alerts can't cost €80 a month.
21 August 2023
On my birthday, I registered findify.nl and started coding.
After 24 hours without sleep, I had a working Telegram bot. It covered Pararius and Funda, had filters for city, price, and number of rooms, sent alerts, and accepted payments. A subscription cost €9.99 a month.
Oleksandr
Creator of Findify · since 21 August 2023
2023-2024
Findify reached its first hundred users on 6 September. User number 1,000 arrived on 19 November.
After that, I added new sites every month. The logic was simple: the more sources Findify covered, the less likely you were to miss the right listing. In February 2024, the bot became a Telegram mini app. You could set up a search and browse listings without leaving Telegram.
For most of 2024, Findify largely ran without me. I had taken another job, and my salary covered its costs.
06.09.2023
100 users
19.11.2023
1000 users
1 January 2025
In autumn 2024, Telegram announced that it would restrict bots offering paid services. Everything I'd spent eighteen months building depended on someone else's platform.
New year, new Findify
On 1 January, I launched the website and mobile app. I rebuilt everything: new code, a new website and app, and the user count back at zero. The price stayed at €9.99.
April 2025
By then, I knew alerts solved only half the problem.
You get twenty alerts a day. Each one means opening a site, finding the form, opening your introduction letter, and filling in the same fields for the twenty-first time. Every day, for weeks. At some point, it stops feeling like a housing search and starts feeling like a shift at a warehouse.
In April 2025, Findify launched Autofill: enter your details once, then apply with one tap on supported sites instead of filling in each form by hand.
September 2025
I wasn't ready to make applications fully automatic. It felt like too much, and I didn't think the market was ready for it.
On 5 September, I turned to another part of the problem: replies from landlords. When you apply to lots of listings, your inbox turns into a mess. You can't tell which email belongs to which listing, which one is a rejection, and which one is an invitation to a viewing. Conversations with landlords moved into the Findify app, each in its own chat. In October, the subscription price rose to €19.99, where it remains today.
November 2025
I didn't have enough money, so I took a job at a warehouse.
Findify kept running. I kept working too - just somewhere else.
28 January 2026
On Reddit, a stranger wrote that he was moving to the Netherlands on 1 March and deciding which service to subscribe to. Findify was on his list.
He didn't know me. Nobody had recommended Findify to him. He was moving to another country and choosing a service to help him find a home. And one of the options was something I'd built in 24 hours on my birthday.
2026
Three weeks later, I left the warehouse. A few days after that, a second person joined Findify.
Sasha Balandina joined Findify as a product designer and started working on the website and app. Her job is to make a complex system easy to use, so that someone opening Findify for the first time can understand it without instructions.
On 22 April, Marina Semikras joined Findify as a growth marketer, focusing on organic growth. Findify had never had much of an ad budget, so the main question was simple: how could people find us on their own?
Sasha Balandina
Product designer · since February 2026
Marina Semikras
Growth marketer · since 22 April 2026
August 2026
That same year, bigger platforms began adding automatic applications - roughly a year after we did. We had spent that year explaining why they mattered.
On 16 August 2026, Findify Pro launched: Findify now submitted applications automatically, so you didn't have to do anything. The exact thing I'd been afraid of in April 2025. By then, automatic applications no longer felt radical. They felt like the next step.
Now
16,900people use Findify to find a home
There's one thing no app can fix: in the Netherlands, landlords usually expect your income to be three or four times the rent. That's the market, and we won't pretend we can change it.
But the search itself can be much easier. Most services only send an alert. Findify helps with what comes next: you can respond faster, avoid filling in the same forms again and again, and keep your conversations organized. And this is only the beginning.
The three of us
Oleksandr Onishchenko
Creator of Findify · 2023
Sasha Balandina
Product designer · 2026
Marina Semikras
Growth marketer · 2026