Company
About us.
Who we are.
Sander Nagtegaal and Marcel Panse have spent more than a decade building infrastructure. They built Peecho, a print-on-demand network, with Marcel as chief architect and Sander as CTO and co-founder, did the same at other start-ups including myTomorrows, and eventually founded Unless, an AI customer agent.
They started Goodfolk to build sovereign, open-source-rooted products for independent creators and developers. Goodfolk also runs QuietJar, a donation platform for European creators.
Chersus is what came out of that: AI workflows for developers, built with the same care for craft, compliance and quiet infrastructure.
Why we exist.
Every AI feature rests on small jobs around the model: check the text, read it, rewrite it, hand it on. Those are the calls you make most, and they are also the ones heavy generative models price absurdly. And by price, we mean not only money, but also speed and security.
Until now, there were two ways to do them. Send everything to a large general model, pay per token for every job and let its provider read your text. Or run your own small models, with servers to keep up and people on call. Both work. Both cost more than the job is worth.
Chersus is the third way: AI workflows for developers. You chain small, purpose-built European models into one request, and relay the result to a large model only when you need one. You pay per character, there is nothing to host, and no content is kept. That is the empty corner of the market, and it is where Chersus sits.
Where we run.
Chersus runs on a European stack, with no US hyperscalers underneath, across 26 EU cities from Amsterdam to Zagreb. The models are European, every request is processed in the EU, and no content is kept. The model provider you relay to is your processor, not ours. We act as processor under Art. 28 GDPR, with a simple DPA and a really short subprocessor list.
What we will never do.
We will never paywall a capability. The free allowance gives you every operation, at full quality, forever. When companies scale, they pay for scale, such as single sign-on and custom uptime SLAs, never for the model features themselves.
Why we are named Chersus.
Chersus takes its name from the historical genus of the Mediterranean land tortoise, rooted in the ancient Greek word chersos - solid ground.
And yes, the tortoise and the hare. We find it funny: the overconfident hare takes an enormous lead, loses focus, and falls asleep halfway through the race. The tortoise simply keeps moving at a steady pace, passes the sleeping hare, and wins.
Heavy generative models sprint in bursts, bill you for the spectacle, and doze off on your latency budget. Our micro-models just keep moving. Slow and steady is not a joke here - it is the architecture ... except that it is super fast.
Your first request is one curl away.
Access opens in batches. Request yours, get your key, and start with 1M characters free every month.