Before you hire anyone
How to choose who writes your EU grant application
Ten questions worth asking any consultant, agency or freelancer who offers to write your application — including us. Our own answers are underneath each one, and two of them are not flattering.
Why this page exists. Almost nobody in this market publishes a price, and the questions that matter most are the ones you only think to ask after you have signed. Publishing the answers in advance costs us the two awkward ones. It seems a fair trade for not having the conversation twice.
Who will personally write my application?
Consultancies sell on the reputation of a partner and staff the work to whoever is free. The name on the proposal and the name in the meeting are often not the same person, and nobody tells you which.
Our answer
Gerben Bijmholt, and there is nobody else. Eucade is one principal by design: the intake, the report, the application text and the questions you get back all come from the same desk. That is also the honest downside — capacity is finite, and when it is full you will be told so rather than handed to someone junior.
How many applications have you submitted, and how many were funded?
This is the question that separates a claim from a record. Ask for the last ten, not the best three, and ask for submitted-versus-funded rather than a percentage.
Our answer — the awkward one
Eucade was founded in 2026 and does not yet have a funded track record worth quoting. There is no logo wall on this site and there are no testimonials, because a single invented signal would be worth less than none. You should weigh that. What is published instead is method: how a fit score is built, what disqualifies an applicant, and where the honest answer is no.
What does it cost, exactly?
Most of this market quotes on request. If a price only appears after a discovery call, you cannot compare, which is usually the point.
Our answer
The prices are on this site. Open-call applications run in bands set by the size of the call, not by the size of your grant: €2,450, €3,950, €5,950 and €8,950, with anything above a €500,000 call quoted on request. A parallel second application is €1,500. A Joint R&D application starts at €9,950 for a two-partner consortium, with €2,500 per partner above two. On the Scale-up Track the Funding Blueprint is €7,450 for the grant route and €11,900 when the full capital stack has to be covered. Across the ladder that works out at roughly 2% to 4% of what the call pays out, and it is fixed and agreed before anything starts.
Is there a success fee, and is it stated separately from the fixed fee?
A percentage of your grant is the industry norm and it is rarely quoted next to the fixed fee, so the total is hard to see. It also gives the writer an incentive to submit rather than to tell you not to.
Our answer
Open-call and Joint R&D applications carry no success fee and no percentage of your grant. There is exactly one exception, and it belongs in the same sentence rather than a footnote: on the Scale-up Track a 2.5% fee applies to an awarded grant component only, with the Blueprint price deducted from it in full.
What happens if I am rejected?
Ask before you sign, not after. The answer separates a service that is paid for work from one that is priced as a bet.
Our answer — the awkward one
Fees are non-refundable. Writing an application is work that is done whether or not the evaluators agree, and pretending otherwise would mean pricing the risk into the fee. What sits in front of that is the free report: it says no before you have paid anything, and it says no reasonably often.
Who owns the proposal and the supporting material afterwards?
You will want to reuse the text for the next call, a national scheme or an investor. Some agreements leave that ambiguous.
Our answer
You do. Article 11.1 of our general terms: ownership of the supplied and submitted application materials rests with the client. Eucade keeps only its own methodology, templates and tools — not your file.
Do I stay in control of the submission?
The applicant carries the legal and financial consequences of what is filed. A writer who submits on your behalf puts your signature on text you may not have read closely.
Our answer
Yes, and it is written down. Article 4.4: the client remains at all times the legal applicant and is solely authorised and responsible for signing and submitting the final application. Nothing leaves under your name without you doing it.
Is what I send you confidential?
You are handing over unpublished technology, cost structures and customer names to someone who also works with companies in your sector.
Our answer
Yes, under article 10 of the general terms, and the free report is explicitly confidential and non-binding under article 3.1. Personal data is handled under the GDPR; the privacy statement sets out how.
Do you actually understand my technology?
A writer who does not understand the technical claim will hedge it, and hedged claims lose points on excellence.
Our answer
Within a deliberately limited number of sectors, yes; outside them, no, and you will be told which. That is the reason the practice does not cover everything: the number of files that can be written to a winning standard in a small number of sectors is not a large number.
Can you guarantee that I will get the grant?
Nobody can, and anyone who implies otherwise is telling you something about their sales process rather than about your odds.
Our answer
No. Awards are decided by independent evaluators and no representation is made about the likelihood of one. The measured base rate on the calls we work on sits in the low single digits, and a report that talks you out of a poor fit is worth more than an application that was never going to score.
What is standard, and where we differ
Three things are common in this market and none of them are wrong in themselves. They are worth knowing about before you compare quotes.
A percentage of your grant
A percentage of the awarded amount is common, frequently on top of a fixed drafting fee rather than instead of it. We have not tried to establish an average and would not trust one; the point is that it is normal enough that you should ask, and ask for it as a number alongside the fixed fee rather than as a clause. On a large instrument the two together are a very different total from the headline. We charge no success fee on open calls or joint R&D, and the single exception on the Scale-up Track is stated above rather than in a schedule.
A team behind a partner name
Larger firms carry real depth — sector specialists, financial modellers, interview coaches — and for a €10 million EIC file that depth is worth paying for. It also means the person who writes your text may not be the person you met. Ask which. For a €60,000 cascade call, one writer who has read the guide is usually the better trade.
A price on request
Quoting after a discovery call is standard practice and makes comparison hard, which is generally the intention. Ours are published above. If another quote is lower, that is useful information and you should take it.
The cheapest way to test any of this
Ask for something in writing before you pay for anything. Our first step on every route is a free written report: your company against a real call, with a fit score and a stated reason where the answer is no. If the writing is not good, you will see it there, and it will have cost you nothing.