Today, TributeMap became an official company

Today I stood at the counter of the Dutch Chamber of Commerce. A form, a signature, a registration number, and 15 minutes later TributeMap is officially a company.

The hour-long round trip and finding a parking spot were harder than the registration itself. Luckily they had good coffee.

It felt smaller than I expected. And at the same time, bigger.

Why now, and not earlier?

The site has been live since late April. Almost two weeks on tributemap.com, with tributes that real people create and share. Many platforms would put the company registration first: first the entity, then the product. With TributeMap, it's the other way around, and on purpose.

A memorial platform asks for trust before it asks for anything else. I wanted to know that the product worked first, that people landed on it calmly, that there was nothing hiding behind a corporate facade. Only when that was settled, and the first real tributes started coming in, did it feel like the right moment to set up the business side alongside it.

What changes for you?

Not much visibly, but underneath quite a bit:

• Proper invoices. For funeral directors and estate professionals who pay for a tribute on behalf of a family, this was awkward until now. From today, it's a normal invoice with a VAT number.
• Stronger guarantees. The retention terms (5 years Premium, 50 years Memoriam, lifetime Permanent) used to rest on me as a private person. From today, they rest on a registered company with its own administration. Not fundamentally different legally, but more careful.
• Mollie as payment provider. In the short term, Mollie will replace the current Ko-fi flow. Mollie is a Dutch company, not American, which fits the promise that everything stays within the EU. For you it means iDEAL and credit card will soon work directly from the tribute page, without a detour.
• A business bank account. Income and expenses now sit separately from my personal account. Boring, but essential for the next step.

The next step: a foundation

The Chamber of Commerce registration isn't an endpoint. It's a precondition for what I already wrote down at /wish-for-later: an independent foundation that, in time, will take the platform and the domain under its care. With its own board, a continuity fund, and a purpose that outlasts me as a person.

That's not happening tomorrow. Setting up a foundation requires a notary appointment, a fund balance large enough to cover yearly costs from its returns, and board members who'll carry it seriously. My internal milestone is a fund of around €20,000, from which the platform's hosting, mail and software costs can be paid yearly out of the returns. That's still far off. But without the Chamber of Commerce step, even moving towards it wasn't possible yet.

What this doesn't change

No advertisements on the platform. No third-party trackers. No newsletters you didn't ask for. No subscriptions that quietly renew. All data stays within the EU. Every tribute is still reviewed by a person before it appears.

Those things were here before the registration, and stay after the registration. A registered company doesn't change who you are, only what you can do.

Thank you to everyone who created or followed a tribute in the past two weeks. You were the reason to walk to that counter today.

Johan
TributeMap