If you are building anything that touches European business data — onboarding, invoicing, KYB, fraud checks — you will eventually ask the same question I did: which countries can I actually get company data from, for free, without an account?
I could not find this written down anywhere, so I worked it out the hard way while building a supplier checker. Here it is.
The baseline: VIES
The European Commission runs VIES, which validates VAT numbers across all 27 member states plus Northern Ireland (XI). It is free, it needs no key, and it is the obvious starting point.
Two things about it are worth knowing before you build on it.
