Developer Turns Austrian Firmenbuch Into REST API

A developer built 'firmafind', a REST API wrapper around Austria's public company register (Firmenbuch) to provide programmatic access to company data (addresses, directors, shareholders, legal form, financial statements). The project required extensive XML parsing because financial statements use cryptographic field codes decoded via an official Excel 'decode key'. The author launched free endpoints with caching to improve performance over the slow government SOAP service, later introduced paid monthly subscriptions after initial scaling and billing complexity. The first paying customer was an international company, prompting an English translation and a shift toward serving international compliance, legal, and fintech customers. Roadmap items include expanding to other European registers, credit scoring from financial statements, and a modular KYC API covering insolvency and beneficial ownership registries. The free search tool remains available at firmafind.at.