We build municipal portals and apps where citizens actually find education, leisure and counselling services. Proven in the German cities of Kiel and Wolfsburg – tailored to your municipality.
Every municipality offers a wealth of services: courses, daycare, counselling, sports, holiday programmes. Scattered across flyers, departmental pages and spreadsheets, they are effectively invisible to citizens – and nearly impossible for your team to maintain.
Our portal system turns this around: each offer is stored once as structured data – date, place, target group, category – and shows up wherever people look: search, map, calendar, app. And because providers enter their own content, the portal stays current without burying your editorial team in data entry.
A platform we have been evolving with real municipalities for years – not a page builder, but a system fitted to your structures.
Kiel runs three audience-specific apps – FamilienApp, KulturKompass, RefugeeCompass – on a single shared backend. New portals don't require new software.
Institutions and associations get their own accounts and maintain offers, dates and locations themselves. Your editors review and publish.
Filters by category, target group, district and date range. Full-text search, interactive map, calendar and list views – whichever fits the content.
Wolfsburger Lupe runs in ten languages; the Kiel apps are multilingual too – reaching newcomers and international families.
All web apps are developed to international accessibility standards – for an audience that genuinely includes everyone.
Every portal ships as a responsive web app and can additionally be published as a native app on Android and iOS.
What keeps a portal alive after launch: every portal runs on the same CMS. Providers enter their own content, your editors review and publish – and a dashboard shows what is happening across your system right now.
Institutions, associations and departments get their own accounts and maintain offers, events and locations themselves – with dedicated roles and responsibilities per institution.
Offers, institutions, events, places, system pages: which content types your portal has and which fields they contain is defined with you – and stays editable in the CMS.
Languages are managed in the CMS, a translation dictionary keeps standard terms consistent, and the dashboard shows which content is still waiting for translation.
From system administration down to a single institution: who may enter, review and publish is configurable in fine detail – including email templates, settings and API documentation.
Screenshots from live operation – shown on our Tripmeister instance. Same system, your branding, your content types.
No slide decks – these are real portals used by real citizens today. Feel free to click through.
Strengthen families. Find services. Make everyday life easier.
Kiel's family portal bundles education and support services for families with children aged 0–12 – currently more than 750 offers, filterable by age, district and topic, multilingual and free.
Visit familienapp-kiel.de →
Discover. Find your way. Take part.
Built for Wolfsburg's education office, the Lupe bundles education, leisure and counselling services – including a daycare and school finder – in ten languages, and accessible by design. Providers maintain their entries through a dedicated login.
Visit wolfsburgerlupe.de →
“With Wolfsburger Lupe we are making a lasting contribution to a clearer and more transparent education landscape in Wolfsburg. The Lupe doesn't just help residents find offers quickly and easily – it also allows us, as a city, to see where further provision is still needed, so we can steer accordingly.”
Discover culture. Save highlights. Rediscover Kiel.
KulturKompass bundles the city's cultural life: events, curated KulTouren and venues – with personal favourites for citizens and a calendar showing what's on in Kiel.
Visit kulturkompass-kiel.de →
Arrive. Get your bearings. Discover support.
RefugeeCompass makes support services in Kiel discoverable for newcomers – multilingual and accessible, from migration counselling and language courses to housing.
Visit refugeecompass-kiel.de →
Structured data instead of text pages.
This is Kiel.FamilienApp's offer list: 765 entries with dates, locations, target groups and prices – filterable by category, district and date range. That structure is exactly what makes a portal useful to citizens.
The same platform also powers the SH-Guide digital travel guide for Schleswig-Holstein and campuscareer-jobs.de with over 320 registered companies – the system does more than family services.
Map, filters, directory, calendar, app – this is what the platform looks like in daily use. All screenshots come from the live portals, no mock-ups.
No off-the-shelf product: we build your portal together with the people who will maintain and use it.
We listen first: departments, providers and the target audience all get a say. Their input shapes your portal's structure – content types, categories, audiences.
You get a clickable prototype in your municipality's branding early on – logo, colours, your own domain.
We set up the portal, CMS and apps, train your editors and providers – and help you populate it with initial content.
We remain available after launch: the Kiel apps have been evolving with the city for years – for as long as you want.
The honest answer: it depends – and we'll tell you early what it depends on.
Each portal is a project, not a subscription. The cost depends on which content types, languages, apps and integrations you need – and how many providers are onboarded. After a free initial call you receive a binding quote before you have to decide anything.
What you won't get: hidden per-entry licence fees, lock-in to a US corporation, or a system that gathers dust after launch.
There is no list price: every portal is tailored to the municipality. Cost depends on content types, languages, apps and integrations. After a first call you receive a binding quote.
Providers and institutions get their own accounts and enter offers, dates and locations themselves. Your editorial team reviews and publishes – they don't have to research anything themselves.
Either on your municipality's own infrastructure – as in Wolfsburg – or managed by Software-by-Design at a German hosting provider.
The portals run on technically necessary cookies only – no user tracking. Analytics are optional and self-hosted, for example with Matomo on your own infrastructure.
Cities, districts, education offices, youth and family services, and independent welfare organisations – anywhere many providers' offers need to be discoverable in one place.
Content is stored as structured data – with dates, locations, target groups and categories. That makes it filterable, mappable, subscribable via iCal and usable in native apps. A conventional website can't do that.
Drop us a few lines about your city and your plans – we'll reply with concrete next steps, not a sales script.
info@software-by-design.deOur agency in Schleswig, Germany: concept, UX design and software development for municipalities, public bodies and companies.
Our own apps for the self-hosted collaboration platform Nextcloud – for organisations that take data sovereignty seriously.