Municipalities and public administration

Forms that get finished online.

Many municipal services begin with a PDF that is printed, filled in and then retyped at the counter. We build websites and forms that reach the office responsible, and we say exactly where the data sits and what we cannot do.

Where the time goes

The PDF to print out

Download, print, fill in, post, and at the counter someone retypes it all. The 2025 monitoring report of Digital Public Services Switzerland cites the European Commission's eGovernment Benchmark: in Switzerland, 79 per cent of the services examined are available online, against 88 per cent in the EU. Data the authorities already hold is pre-filled for only 26 per cent of services, against an EU average of 71 per cent.

Services nobody can find

In the National E-Government Study 2025, 53 per cent of the population name finding the right official services as too complicated, the biggest obstacle of all. 44 per cent think their municipality should expand what it offers online.

Too few people for too many channels

More than 1,600 of the then 2,131 municipalities took part in the fourth municipal survey by Myni Gmeind, the Swiss Association of Municipalities and FHNW in 2024. Almost 90 per cent rated their staffing for digital transformation as rather insufficient.

What we build instead

A website that gets found.

Two languages as standard, structured data for search engines, built to the accessibility criteria from keyboard operation to contrast. The visitor statistics set no cookie and store no IP address, so there is no banner.

Forms instead of PDFs.

A form asks what the office needs and lands in the admin area and in the inbox of the office that handles it. Where a service needs a sign-in, it runs through EAuth, with a passkey or a password and a second factor.

Email on the municipal domain.

EMX (Beta) with shared mailboxes, for instance for the residents' office or building administration, messages stored encrypted in Geneva. CHF 4 per mailbox and month.

A slow process replaced.

As a mandate: goal, period, price and what will be measurably different at the end, on a single page, with a weekly update in figures.

What you can expect from us

Accessibility.: For federal authorities, Art. 14 of the Disability Discrimination Act requires online services that people with visual impairments can use without added difficulty. The Confederation applies eCH-0059 version 3, meaning WCAG 2.1 level AA. Municipalities follow the law of their canton. Our websites are built to these criteria; we do not yet have an independent test report against eCH-0059.
Data protection and outsourcing.: Municipalities fall under cantonal data protection law, not the federal FADP (Art. 2 FADP). The cantonal data protection commissioners (privatim) require a risk analysis before any outsourcing to a cloud, however sensitive the data. Anyone working on behalf of an authority is bound by official secrecy as an auxiliary (Art. 320 Criminal Code).
Data location.: Stored data sits on our own servers at European providers in Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands and France. Notification mails are sent by Resend, a US service. That is not a Swiss-only operation.
Export.: Texts, images, enquiries and data can be exported in full at any time.
What is missing.: No ISO 27001 or SOC 2 certification, no independent security audit.

Questions we hear

Can residents sign in with the e-ID?

Not yet. The e-ID Act was accepted on 28 September 2025 with 50.39 per cent voting yes. On 30 June 2026 the Federal Office of Justice postponed the launch of the e-ID without a new date; the trust infrastructure is due to go live in the first half of 2027. EAuth does not support the e-ID today, and we give no date for it.

Does EMBAG apply to our municipality?

Not directly. EMBAG applies to the federal administration (Art. 2) and requires it to publish the source code of software it develops (Art. 9). We keep the source code of the platform beneath our websites; your content and data stay yours.

May data under official secrecy be stored with you?

Your risk analysis under cantonal law decides that, not we. For sensitive data, privatim considers outsourcing to international providers acceptable in most cases only if the authority encrypts the data itself and the provider has no access to the key. With us, that applies to sealed mailboxes in EMX; other data we could technically read as the operator.

Does the fixed price apply to a municipal website?

The CHF 6,000 and CHF 300 a month apply to a company website. Whether the scope of your municipal website fits within it, we will tell you after the first conversation.

Name the form that costs you most

A short message is enough. Within two working days someone from the team that would build it replies. Write to us at elchi.dev/en/kontakt or call +41 58 513 63 11, weekdays from 8 to 18.

Talk to us

+41 58 513 63 11 contact@elchi.dev

Sources

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