A new toilet facility costs your city up to €600,000 – and then around €33,000 a year in upkeep. We turn existing cafés, restaurants and gyms into a digitally managed toilet network. In weeks instead of years.
That is what the toilet facility at Egelseer Heide cost the German city of Stuttgart – the connection alone required 260 metres of water, sewage and power lines. Typical new builds cost €135,000 to €400,000.
Sources (in German): Stuttgarter Nachrichten, 24 September 2025 · Berlin Senate Department UVKStuttgart spends €2.5 million a year on 75 facilities. Freiburg is at €46,000 and Berlin at around €45,000 per facility. User charges cover only a fraction of that.
Sources (in German): Stuttgarter Nachrichten, 2025 · LKZ, 2024 · Berlin Senate report, doc. h19-1786Berlin records around 20,000 faults a year, more than 90 % of them caused by vandalism. A toilet inside a staffed business does not have this problem.
Source (in German): Berlin.de, press release 24 June 2025Investment depreciated over 15 years plus ongoing upkeep. At 70 uses a day – the figure measured in the Berlin pilot project – every single use costs the city €1.94. Against a user charge of €0.50.
The Berlin Senate puts it this way itself: operating costs exceed user charges “by more than tenfold”.
Every city centre has hundreds of clean, heated, daily-cleaned toilets – in cafés, bakeries, restaurants, gyms and hotels. LooNow turns them into a contractually secured, measured and quality-assured network.
A toilet network made of other people's doors only holds if the maths works for every side – otherwise one of them drops out. So here, in plain terms, is what each side gets: your city, the business that opens the door, the people standing in front of it – and what LooNow takes on in return.
Your city decides which neighbourhoods lack provision and what level of provision it wants. We supply a gap analysis as the basis.
You sign a framework contract with LooNow. The obligation to pay only arises once a location actually goes live. If we find no operations partner, you pay nothing.
LooNow recruits and vets businesses in your target zones – by location, opening hours, condition and accessibility. Gyms, hotels and petrol stations are used deliberately to cover the early and late hours.
The business gets the LooNow operations partner sticker for its window and is activated as a blue premium pin in the app. We handle onboarding and briefing.
Users pick the blue premium pin in the app, navigate to the business, identify themselves to staff as LooNow users and scan the operations partner's QR code. That releases access – and records every use in verified form: the basis for a fair, usage-based fee and for your data in the dashboard. Afterwards they rate the location.
You pay one invoice. LooNow pays 80 % out to the operations partners. In the dashboard you see what your city gets for it – and adjust zones and levels of provision.
A pure flat fee penalises the businesses that work best. Pure usage-based billing is impossible to budget for. So we combine the two – with a hard cap at the top.
| Metric | Mid-sized city ~60,000 residents | Large city ~250,000 residents | Metropolis ~600,000 residents |
|---|---|---|---|
| LooNow locations | 8 | 25 | 60 |
| Your cost per year | €44,400 | €138,750 | €333,000 |
| Equivalent own facilities | 3 | 8 | 20 |
| Their fully loaded cost per year | €132,444 | €413,889 | €993,333 |
| Ongoing saving | €88,044 (66 %) | €275,139 (66 %) | €660,333 (66 %) |
| Investment avoided | ~€667,000 | ~€2.08 m | ~€5.0 m |
| of which to local businesses | €35,520 | €111,000 | €266,400 |
Model calculation. Assumptions: reference location in category B with 350 uses a month · 3 LooNow locations provide the same coverage as one municipal facility · fully loaded cost of a municipal facility €49,667/year (€250,000 investment over 15 years plus €33,000 upkeep). We work out the actual figures for your city together.
Berlin measures between 30 and 169 uses a day at its own facilities – depending on location and season. A factor of 5.6. Paying a flat rate means spending money blind. As a Partner City you see every location in real time.
Heat map of the gaps, reachability in walking minutes, availability by weekday and time of day. You see where another zone makes sense – before anyone complains.
Ratings per location, complaints with their processing status, adherence to committed opening hours per operations partner. If they fall short, contractual consequences apply.
Actual costs, a forecast to year end and the comparison against the fully loaded cost of your own facilities – exportable for council papers and budget planning.
No – and we expressly recommend writing that into the framework contract. LooNow is densification, not replacement. For the same money you get around three times as many access points. Existing facilities keep their role, especially where there are no businesses nearby.
The usage-based fee makes dropping out economically unattractive for a well-performing business – that is the strongest retention there is. If a location does fall away, your payment for it ends immediately and we find a replacement.
Because without it the whole model does not work. Only scanning the operations partner's QR code turns a visit into a verified use – that is the only way the business can be paid by actual footfall instead of a flat rate, and the only way the figures in your dashboard come about. At the same time it protects businesses from being overrun. For users, registration is free, takes seconds and requires no payment details.
Your city receives aggregated, anonymised metrics only. No personal usage profiles are passed to the municipality. The GDPR concept and the data processing agreement are in place before the pilot starts.
Twelve months, six to ten locations in one neighbourhood, success criteria defined together – usage figures, satisfaction, retention of the operations partners. At the end there is a solid report as a basis for the council's decision. From go-ahead to the first open location usually takes six to ten weeks.
That is the classic weakness of hospitality-based models – and the reason we deliberately recruit 24/7 gyms, petrol stations, hotels and late-night shops. The €60 supplement for early and late hours is what makes exactly those locations attractive. We do not achieve full night coverage in every neighbourhood, and we say so openly.
Take two minutes to tell us which municipality you act for and where it hurts. We reply with a first assessment – including a rough savings calculation for your city.
No obligation. No cost. You only pay once a location is live.