FAQ
Is Pegel free?
Yes. Free to browse, free to subscribe, free to apply through. There is no paid tier. There is no plan for one.
Do you take money from employers?
No. Employers can't pay to list, can't pay to be featured, can't pay to influence ordering. The companies on the list are there because they were added to a YAML file in the repository, based on whether they fit the "Berlin startup" definition. Nothing else.
How do you make money then?
It doesn't. The founder covers Pegel's running costs personally.
How fresh is the data?
Updated three times a day. The first polling window starts at 04:05 UTC; later windows start at 10:05 and 16:05 UTC. A role posted at noon can appear in the afternoon window. A role removed from the ATS is kept on Pegel for three days before being marked expired (to handle ATS providers failing temporarily).
How is Pegel different from Berlin Startup Jobs?
Pegel does not depend on employers submitting individual roles. The founder chooses the companies that fit its scope, then Pegel reads eligible Berlin roles from their public hiring feeds. Employers cannot buy a listing or a higher position.
The inventory changes after every polling window. Current inventory totals and freshness evidence are on the live Stats page. Pegel does not keep a static competitor count here because it would go stale.
How is Pegel different from LinkedIn Jobs?
LinkedIn is a recruiting platform with a job board attached. Pegel is a job board with no recruiting platform attached. On LinkedIn you have an account, a profile, a recruiter pipeline. Here you have neither. You leave the site to apply on the company's own page.
How is Pegel different from arbeitnow or workwise?
They cover broader geographies and use different inventory models. Pegel is deliberately Berlin-only and reads the public hiring feeds of the companies it tracks. If you are searching beyond Berlin, use a broader board alongside Pegel.
How do the main Berlin job boards compare?
Pegel does not publish a static league table. Other boards change their inventory and commercial model. Their geographic scope can change too, so a copied comparison becomes misinformation quickly.
Pegel's side is stable: it is free for job seekers, and employers cannot pay for placement. It polls the public hiring feeds of an operator-curated company list three times daily. Its current numbers are published on /stats.
What's a "Berlin startup" for Pegel's purposes?
Pegel tracks tech-led companies with a meaningful Berlin presence and a public hiring feed it can read reliably. The list includes early-stage startups and scaleups. It also includes some larger or acquired companies that remain part of Berlin's tech market.
Pegel excludes recruiting firms and companies without Berlin-relevant roles. Borderline cases are reviewed manually rather than filled in by an automatic rule.
My company isn't on the list. How do I get added?
Use the "Submit a company" form linked in the footer and on every company page. Include the company name and careers URL. An ATS hint helps when you know it. Every submission is reviewed manually, and the companies that fit get added.
A listing on Pegel is wrong / out of date / spam.
Email pegel@mail.pegel.berlin with the link to the role and what's off. Every report gets read. If a whole company should come off Pegel, its page links to a removal-request form.
The language requirement classification is wrong.
Email pegel@mail.pegel.berlin with the role link and a short explanation. The classification gets reviewed and corrected when the evidence supports that. Cases that expose a reusable gap go into the evaluation set.
Do you sponsor visa applications?
Pegel is a job board, not an employer. It doesn't sponsor anyone. The "visa sponsorship" filter combines two kinds of evidence: a statement in the job posting, or a verified company-level signal when that posting stays silent. Pegel labels the scope on the role page. Verify with the employer before assuming.
Do I need a German residence permit to apply?
That depends on the company and the role. EU citizens don't need one. Non-EU candidates usually need either a BlueCard (EU residence permit for highly-qualified workers, salary threshold-based) or a regular employment permit. The visa-sponsorship filter is a useful first signal but not legal advice.
What kind of German do I need?
The language filter splits roles into two buckets:
- English: German is not needed to do the job. The team works in English, or the role is explicitly English-only, or German is only ever framed as "a plus."
- German required: German is needed to do the work, at any level from solid business German (B2/C1) through native. Customer-facing and German-language roles usually land here.
Why two and not four: the distinction a job-seeker acts on is binary. Either you can do the job in English or you cannot. Splitting "B2" from "C1" added a precision the data could not reliably support and that nobody filtered on.
When you don't work in German, filter to "English." When you do, "German required" surfaces the rest. Roles where the requirement is genuinely unclear stay unclassified and show in neither filter (an honest gap beats a confident guess).
A new language-classifier version is held to a 95% accuracy bar on a hand-labeled evaluation set before it ships. Use the filter as a discovery aid, then verify the job description when it matters.
Does Pegel show German-language job descriptions?
Yes. The job description stays in German verbatim. Pegel does not auto-translate it. The language classifier labels the role from the evidence it can support; genuinely unclear cases remain unclassified.
How are salaries shown?
Only what the employer disclosed. If the job description says "€80-100k," that is what appears. If it says nothing about salary, no salary appears. Pegel does not estimate or fill in gaps.
How does the email digest work?
Subscribe with your email and your filter preferences. Confirm via the email Pegel sends (double opt-in). From the next morning forward, Monday to Saturday, you get a digest at 07:30 Berlin time with up to 20 of the newest roles matching your filters. If nothing new matches, you get a short note saying so instead of silence.
Each subscription lasts 6 months. After that it expires and the digest stops, and you just re-subscribe to start another 6 months. The limit exists so the list only holds people who still want it, which keeps Pegel out of spam folders.
Unsubscribe is one click in every email. The manage link lets you change your filters.
What if I change cities mid-search?
Email to unsubscribe, or click the unsubscribe link. Pegel is Berlin-only. If it ever extends to other cities, it will be under the same operator and the same operational ethos.
Will Pegel always be free?
Yes. That is stated everywhere it can be: the README, this FAQ, the About page. If running it ever becomes unaffordable, Pegel will shut down gracefully (with 4 weeks of warning to subscribers) rather than monetize. Reasoning: a paid tier or employer-pays model would change what kinds of companies get visible, which would destroy what's useful about it.
Will Pegel always exist?
No. It runs as long as its founder finds it worth running. If life intervenes, the shutdown plan is documented. Subscribers get 4 weeks of notice. The data is archived. The domain stays parked for at least 5 years to prevent squatters.
Can I use Pegel's data in my own project?
Yes. The company list and the job feed are licensed CC0 1.0. Build whatever. Attribution appreciated, not required. The shipped surfaces today: /feed.xml (sitewide RSS), per-company RSS at /companies/[slug]/feed.xml, /data/companies.json, and /llms-full.txt (a daily denormalized snapshot for LLM consumption). The public API is documented at /api and rate-limited to 60 requests per minute per IP.
Why is the site so plain?
By design. The aesthetic is calibrated to feel like infrastructure rather than marketing. The Berlin startup audience reads code and code-adjacent things for a living; they don't need or want a gradient hero and three feature cards.
Why "Pegel"?
It's the German word for a gauge or water level. The kind that reads the level of something quiet but moving. The site reads the Berlin startup hiring market the same way. Daily. Without opinions about what the level should be.
Something else to ask
Email pegel@mail.pegel.berlin. Every message gets read.