TaxID is a developer-first API for validating EU VAT numbers in real time. It wraps the European Commission's VIES service in a modern REST interface, so engineering teams can verify a customer's VAT registration during checkout, onboarding, or invoicing without wrestling with SOAP, XML envelopes, or the frequent downtime of the underlying government service.

The core problem TaxID solves is reliability. VIES is the authoritative source for EU VAT number validation, but it is a legacy SOAP endpoint with unpredictable availability and per-country member state outages. Integrating with it directly means writing XML parsers, handling inconsistent error states, and building your own retry and caching layer. TaxID handles all of that behind a single JSON endpoint, returning clean, typed responses including an explicit service_unavailable state so your application can degrade gracefully instead of failing a checkout.

Key capabilities include real-time VAT number validation against VIES for all EU member states, company name and address resolution where the member state provides it, EU VAT rate lookup by country and category, structured error handling that distinguishes an invalid VAT number from a temporarily unreachable member state, and a public status page so you can see VIES availability per country at any time.

TaxID is built for teams handling B2B transactions in the EU, where charging the correct VAT depends on knowing whether your customer's VAT number is genuinely registered. It is a natural fit alongside Stripe, where reverse-charge treatment requires a validated VAT ID before tax is exempted, and equally at home in custom billing systems, ERP integrations, and internal compliance tooling.
Integration is intentionally minimal: authenticate with an API key, send a VAT number, receive a structured response. There is no SDK to learn and no SOAP client to configure. Full documentation with copy-paste examples is available at taxid.dev.