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The most reformed framework in Europe
Belgium has moved further than most of the EU. The 2022 reform of the sexual criminal law decriminalised third-party involvement in sex work that is not exploitative, and the law of 3 May 2024 made Belgium the first country to give sex workers formal employment contracts, with authorisation requirements for employers. The exploitation offences are unchanged and advertising of sexual services remains regulated, so the distance between a lawful business model and a criminal one sits in the details of the contract and the platform's actual role. On top of this run the EU DSA, with the BIPT as digital services coordinator, and the GDPR under the APD.
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Payments and the Bancontact problem
Belgian banks and Bancontact do not serve adult, and Stripe and PayPal prohibit it. Verotel, SegPay, CCBill and Epoch are the practical options, settling in euros with 3-D Secure 2 for EEA cards. The conversion issue is local habit: Belgian consumers reach for Bancontact by default, so a card-only checkout needs to be confident and clear rather than apologetic, with an honest billing descriptor stated before payment. Crypto covers the tail of users who will not put a card through at all.
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Three official languages, two real markets
Dutch for Flanders, French for Wallonia and Brussels, German for the eastern cantons, English for the EU-institution audience, and Russian or Ukrainian where the diaspora is your segment. Legal texts must be available in the language of the region you address. For SEO we treat Dutch and French as two independent sites sharing a codebase but not sharing copy - a translated Flemish page will not rank against native competitors, and Belgian users notice immediately.
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Hosting, DSA duties and performer records
Host inside the EU. The DSA requires a notice-and-action mechanism, a single point of contact and statements of reasons for removals, at any company size. If you allow user-generated content you also need documented age and consent records for every performer - the card schemes will ask for these long before a regulator does. We keep that dataset in storage separated from the public platform, with its own access log, so it can be produced on request without exposing anything else.