The Fit 4 Digital assessment is not free in the loose sense of the word. It carries a price, fixed at €5,000, and that price is covered in full by a grant of the same amount, so the sum moves through the programme rather than out of your account.
That is the whole planning point: a fixed sum is a fixed quantity of consultant attention. What it produces, per the programme page on guichet.lu, is a digital-maturity diagnosis ending in a costed action plan. That plan is the raw material for the funding that follows it.
The amount is a scope, not a discount
Because the figure is fixed rather than quoted, there is nothing to negotiate on price. Consultants compete instead on approach and on the questions they ask, which is a far more useful axis to choose on than a rate card.
The fixed figure also means the sum is spent whether or not it is spent well: the company that hands over a morning of interviews and a login gets the same €5,000 of work as the company that arrives with its numbers assembled.
That inverts the usual constraint. In a paid engagement, budget limits depth. Here the budget is settled and the binding constraint becomes the owner's own attention; an assessment nobody senior can spare a few hours for produces a plan about the version of the company that answers the door.
Before you settle on anyone, ask what the consultant sells when they are not doing assessments. An outside diagnosis earns its independence only if the diagnostician has nothing waiting at the end of it.
The sequence: diagnose, decide, then fund the work
The assessment matters out of proportion to its size because it produces costed actions, and costed actions are what an aid application is made of. The instrument that pays for the implementation side is SME Packages Digital, which reimburses up to 70% of eligible costs on projects of €3,000–25,000.
If you arrived here from a page recommending "Fit4Digital Packages", that is the aid now documented under the SME Packages name, and the definitive guide follows the naming through in detail.
| Stage | What it produces | The published figure | What it settles |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fit 4 Digital assessment | a digital-maturity diagnosis and a costed action plan | fixed at €5,000, covered in full by a grant of the same amount | which work is worth doing, and in what order |
| Your decision | nothing — the plan is yours to act on or to shelve | — | whether anything happens at all |
| SME Packages Digital | the expert project the plan named | up to 70% of eligible costs, on projects of €3,000–25,000 | how much of the work the company funds itself |
The middle row is the one founders skip when they describe this as a single pipeline. Nothing obliges you to implement anything. What the assessment does is convert "we should probably digitalise" into named jobs with prices attached, and a priced job can be measured against a published cost band. An intention cannot.
Where each recommended action lands against the band
Run this test on the report the moment it arrives, one line at a time. The SME Packages Digital conditions set the eligible band on the cost of the project, so where each recommendation sits against that band decides how it can be paid for. That question can be answered before anyone has been engaged to do the work.
| Where a costed action lands | Against the €3,000–25,000 band | The move it forces |
|---|---|---|
| Under the floor | outside the published band for this route | fund it from operating budget, or recognise it as part of one coherent project |
| Inside the band | eligible costs, on which up to 70% may be claimed | write it as one project with one outcome, and settle the funding question before signing |
| Over the ceiling | outside the published band for this route | phase it deliberately, or take the size question to the programme |
One caution belongs with that table, and it runs in both directions. Do not slice a single engagement into fragments so that each fragment fits, and do not bundle unrelated actions upward to reach the floor. Scoping is a judgement about what makes one coherent project, and the working test is whether you can describe that project's success in a sentence.
What the plan needs to contain to be worth anything later
A report that recommends "improve the website" cannot be tested against a cost band at all; you would have to go back to the consultant to find out what it means.
So ask, while the report is still in draft, for every recommendation to carry a cost, a position in the sequence, and a named owner inside your company. Costs usually arrive unasked. Sequencing and ownership are what turn a document into a plan, and they are the two that go missing when nobody requests them.
The second test is portability. Take each action and imagine handing it to a different competent supplier: if it still makes sense, the assessment did its job. If the plan only reads as one vendor's scope of works, it did not.
What you show is what you get diagnosed
Honesty and a few hours. A consultant can only diagnose what is put in front of them, and companies that tidy up for the visit receive a plan for the tidy version of themselves. The money hides in the workflows people are embarrassed by: the spreadsheet one person maintains, the figures retyped between two systems every Friday, the quotes living in a folder full of files named final_v3.
Come to the first session with the unglamorous material. How orders arrive in a normal month and by which routes. Where each kind of data actually lives, and which system wins when two of them disagree. The tasks staff complain about most. Hours the consultant spends discovering your org chart are hours not spent on the diagnosis, and those are the hours you control.
The sequencing that costs money
The expensive order is commissioning the work first and looking for a scheme to pay for it afterwards. A signed engagement is a decision already taken, and a decision already taken is the weakest input you can bring to a funding conversation. That pattern and its relatives are covered in our funding mistakes guide. The cheap order is the reverse: understand what the plan recommends, establish how each piece can be paid for, then commit.
The other mis-sequence is subtler and sometimes defensible. A company that already knows exactly what it needs skips the diagnosis and goes straight after implementation funding. The cost of that shortcut is that the project then gets scoped by whoever intends to deliver it, and nobody in the room is being paid to say the project is the wrong one.
Common questions
These come up once the amounts stop being abstract, usually in the week someone finally opens the report.
Is this for startups or for established companies?
Eligibility is set by the programme's own conditions, published on the official page, and that is where to check whether your company meets them. Usefulness is a separate question. A business with running operations has something real to diagnose: orders arriving, quotes going out, information living in several places at once. A company founded last year entirely inside modern tooling mostly receives a plan confirming what it already knows.
What does it actually cost us?
The assessment is fixed at €5,000 and covered in full by a grant of the same amount, so the cash cost of the diagnosis is nil. The real cost is calendar: senior time in the interviews, plus someone assembling the operational numbers beforehand. Cost re-enters at implementation, where the company carries whatever share of an SME Packages Digital project the reimbursement does not cover.
Do we have to implement the plan?
No. The plan is a document you own, and shelving it is a legitimate outcome, occasionally the right one when the diagnosis shows the bottleneck is not technological. What implementing it changes is which instruments become relevant: a costed action inside the €3,000–25,000 band is a candidate project, one outside it a budgeting question.
How long does it take?
The clock is mostly yours. Consultant availability and your own scheduling set the pace, and the interviews cannot be compressed below the people who genuinely need to be in them. Any timing the programme publishes sits on the official page above. What you control is being ready when the diary opens rather than starting the data-gathering afterwards.
Can we pick the consultant?
Read the programme page on how consultants are selected before you have a favourite. Within a fixed sum the consultant's method determines the depth you get, so weigh the questions they ask you at first contact more heavily than the logos on their deck.
Before you book the assessment
None of this decides what the plan will say, and none of it changes how the programme treats an application. What it changes is whether the fixed sum gets spent on your company or on discovering it, and whether the report that lands is a document you can act on or a PDF that ages in a shared drive. Run these in order; the first can rule the exercise out in an afternoon.
- Read the conditions on the programme page and confirm your company meets them.
- Name the internal owner: whoever sits in the interviews and is still accountable for the plan a quarter later.
- Put the operational numbers in one place: volumes, systems, who maintains what, what breaks.
- Write down the problems you already believe you have, then compare that list with the report. The gaps are the value.
- Read every recommendation against the €3,000–25,000 band before deciding the order of work.
That last step is where understanding turns into doing. The groundwork behind it — the numbers in one place, an owner who can answer questions — carries straight into assembling the application file and its annexes for whichever recommendation you decide to act on first.