Every developer building for European markets hits the same wall eventually. EU VAT rates are public data — the European Commission publishes them — but getting that data into your codebase reliably is a mess. You hardcode the rates, they change, your invoices are wrong. You scrape a website, the HTML structure changes, your scraper breaks. You pay $50–200/month for vatstack or vatlayer to access data the EC gives away for free.
I built eu-vat-rates-data to fix this: a free, open-source dataset of EU VAT rates, published as native packages for npm, PyPI, Go Module, RubyGems, and Packagist — updated daily from the official source, with zero manual steps in the publishing pipeline. The full project overview is in the eu-vat-rates-data project card.
This is how it works, and what I learned building a single dataset across five language ecosystems.
Why Five Registries
The first question I get: why not just publish JSON and let developers fetch it themselves?
