The figure that kills a market entry is rarely the incorporation invoice. It is the forty-thousand-euro test budget that quietly becomes two hundred thousand. Build the whole thing below — all four layers, month by month — and see where the money actually leaves.
Every entry budget breaks into the same four buckets. Underestimating the last two is the classic and expensive mistake, and it is the one the builder above is designed to make visible.
Incorporation, registry fees, structuring advice and the documents that have to exist before any of it can happen. Largely fixed, entirely predictable, and the smallest line on the page — which is precisely why quoting it alone is misleading.
The certified accountant the law requires, a registered address, certified invoicing software and the filing calendar. Begins on day one, continues whether or not you trade, and is the line that makes a dormant company quietly expensive.
The largest line the moment it exists. Minimum wage is €920 paid across fourteen instalments, employer contributions add 23.75%, and salaries vary by a third between Lisbon and the interior for the same role.
The only layer you fully control, and the one that decides whether the other three were worth spending. It is also where drift happens: a budget set for three months that runs for nine because nobody agreed in advance what would count as a negative result.
Not price lists. These are the three shapes we see most often, with the figures the builder above produces for each.
An entity created for a future project or to hold assets. No operations, no staff, no commercial budget — and still not free, because the accountant and the filings are statutory.
Real activity, invoices to clients, VAT and intra-EU trade. The owner works the business personally or through contractors, and a modest pilot runs alongside.
Workspace, two to five people and a funded pilot. This is the version that establishes whether the market is real, and the one where the region you chose starts to matter financially.
Figures exclude our fees, which are scoped separately and fixed before work begins. They also exclude VAT, which is recoverable for a registered trading company but is a cash-flow item in the meantime.
First-year budgets are usually written carefully. What rarely gets written down is what happens if the pilot returns an ambiguous result — not a clear yes, not a clear no — and the sensible-looking decision each month is to continue for one more.
That is how a €40,000 test becomes a €200,000 commitment without a single bad decision being taken. The protection is not a bigger budget; it is agreeing in advance what a negative result looks like and who is allowed to call it.
Every figure above is a market range or your own assumption. A real estimate needs your legal form, your region, your headcount plan and your channel economics, and it comes with our fee stated separately. That conversation takes about half an hour and costs nothing.
Usually it is the pilot duration, occasionally the headcount timing, and very often the assumption that the second year looks like the first. Better to hear it now.