HuurPlug: Every Dutch Rental, No Paywall

Finding a rental in the Netherlands means checking a dozen sites every day, and the aggregators that solve that for you almost all charge a monthly fee. Charging desperate people for the privilege of looking for housing is a bit grim, so HuurPlug does it for free.

It pulls from over 700 sources, Pararius, Funda and Kamernet among them, and covers the whole country: at the time of writing, ten thousand or so listings across nearly 700 cities. No paywall, no account needed to see an address.

Aggregation turns out to be a deduplication problem in disguise. The same apartment appears on five sites with different photos, slightly different square metres, and a price that may or may not include utilities. Collapsing those into one listing without accidentally merging two genuinely different apartments in the same building is where most of the work goes.

One search instead of twenty tabs, and it costs the person looking for a house nothing.