Terms of Service and Sale

1. Scope and acceptance

The service is reserved exclusively for professionals acting for business purposes, to the exclusion of any subscription by a consumer within the meaning of consumer-protection law. By creating an account, you represent that you are acting in that capacity; that representation alone does not override a different qualification if the facts contradict it, and we take care that our sign-up flow and our marketing address professionals only.

In these Terms, "Vatlas" and "we" both mean JULIEN MAULNY EURL acting as the provider of the service; the "Service" means the API, the developer console and the site together. Vatlas is the trading name under which JULIEN MAULNY EURL operates that Service.

By creating an account — free or paid — you acknowledge that you have read these Terms, accessible from the sign-up form, and accept them. When subscribing to the Basic plan, this acceptance is further confirmed before the order is completed on the Stripe payment page. The version of the Terms in force at the time of your acceptance, and its date, are kept on record and can be provided to you on request.

2. The service

Vatlas is a B2B API operated by JULIEN MAULNY EURL ("we", "us") that resolves European intra-community VAT numbers into company records: legal name, national identifier, legal form, status and address. Data is sourced from official national registers and from VIES; we do not operate any of those registers, and the underlying administration remains the authoritative source.

3. Accounts and API keys

One account per person or organisation. You are responsible for keeping your credentials and API keys confidential and for all activity carried out under them. Revoke a key immediately from the console if you suspect it has been exposed; a revoked key may continue to answer for up to sixty seconds.

4. Acceptable use

You may not use the API to circumvent metering or authentication, to bulk-extract the underlying dataset for resale as a competing data product, or for any unlawful purpose. We may suspend a key used in a way that threatens the service for other customers.

5. Data you submit

Qualification is assessed processing by processing, by reference to who actually determines its purposes and essential means. For the standard service — building and operating our database from public registers, then resolving a number you send us — those decisions are ours: Vatlas acts as controller for them, and you as a separate controller for the use you make of the results. You answer for the lawfulness of that use, including the legal basis you rely on where a result concerns a natural person, as it may for a sole trader.

If, on the other hand, we agreed to process data on your behalf, on your instructions and without determining the purposes ourselves, Vatlas would act as processor for that processing and the Article 28 terms set out in the addendum would apply. Neither qualification holds in advance for everything: it follows from the processing in question.

The number you submit is kept in our call logs to compute your quota and produce your usage history; it is not reused for any other purpose — see the Privacy Policy. The Data protection (DPA) sets out this allocation of roles, what it means for your own compliance, and the Article 28 terms that would apply should a genuine processor relationship ever arise.

6. Plans and renewal

The Free plan includes 100 requests a month at no cost. The Basic plan includes 10,000 requests a month for 14 € excluding VAT per month, automatically renewed each month on the anniversary of your subscription. The monthly quota does not carry over between periods: requests left unused at the end of a month are lost, with no rollover and no refund. Once the quota is reached, the API answers 429 until it renews.

Cancelling a Basic subscription does not end the service immediately: it stays active until the end of the period already paid for, then falls back to Free, with no pro-rata refund for the remainder of the current period. That absence of a refund covers cancellation on your initiative: it does not apply where termination follows a breach on our part, a permanent discontinuation of the Service, or your refusal of a substantial change under section 14, nor in any case where the law requires a refund. Current plan details are on the pricing page.

7. Price and payment terms

Prices are stated excluding VAT. VAT is added at the rate in force on the invoice date, except where the reverse charge applies — a VAT-registered customer established in another member state who has supplied a valid intra-community VAT number, which Stripe verifies at subscription. Any change to the tax regime applicable to JULIEN MAULNY EURL, or to the VAT rate, applies automatically to later invoices and is not a change to these Terms.

The Basic plan is payable in full by automatic charge through Stripe against your registered payment method, monthly and in advance, on the anniversary of your subscription, which is the due date. No discount is offered for early payment. A compliant invoice is issued on every payment.

The due date is the date shown on the invoice. Under Article L441-10 of the French Commercial Code, late-payment penalties run as of right from the day after that date, with no reminder required. Their rate is set at three times the French statutory interest rate, which may never be lower than that legal floor. A fixed recovery indemnity of €40 is also due for each invoice paid late, and where the recovery costs actually incurred exceed that amount we may claim further compensation on production of evidence.

If an automatic charge fails, Stripe retries it on its own schedule. Those retries are a commercial accommodation, not an extension of the due date: your access to the Basic plan is maintained throughout, and in practice we do not claim penalties on an amount settled during that period, but the legal starting point above is unaffected. If the amount is still unpaid once the retries end, the subscription is suspended and then terminated, and the account falls back to Free.

These provisions of the French Commercial Code apply to the extent that French law governs the payment obligation, which these Terms provide. Where a mandatory rule of your own jurisdiction displaces them, that rule prevails.

8. Availability and force majeure

We aim to keep the service available at all times, but make no uptime guarantee and may perform maintenance with or without notice.

Neither party will be liable for a failure to perform its obligations where that failure results from an event of force majeure within the meaning of Article 1218 of the French Civil Code — an event beyond the affected party's control, which could not reasonably have been foreseen when these Terms were entered into, and whose effects could not have been avoided by appropriate measures. Where they meet those conditions, this may include a prolonged failure or unavailability of a third-party provider (hosting, technical subcontractor), a major data-centre incident, a cyberattack, a natural disaster, a network outage, or the extended unavailability of a national register or of VIES.

9. Data accuracy

Data returned by the API comes from the official national registers we import, from the official APIs of some administrations queried on demand, and from VIES, the European Commission's own verification service, used as a last resort — the current list of sources per country is available through GET /v1/countries. How often each source is updated is outside our control and is not contractually guaranteed: an answer may therefore be out of date at the moment you receive it. Where a discrepancy exists, the originating administration or register is authoritative. We do not warrant the completeness, accuracy or continuous availability of this data, and are not liable for errors, omissions or unavailability attributable to those third-party sources. You agree to use the data you obtain only within the limits allowed by the reuse conditions published by each of those sources, in particular VIES's own conditions. This data is not legal, tax or accounting advice, and it is your responsibility to verify anything you rely on for a compliance decision.

10. What you may do with the data returned

You may use the data returned by the API for the purposes of your own business: verifying a VAT registration, pre-filling a form, enriching your customer base, populating an invoice or a compliance file. You may store it in your own systems and display it to your users in that context.

You may not, however, redistribute that data as such, republish it as a database, directory or dataset consultable by third parties, or resell it as a data product.

What underlies that restriction differs from one source to the next, and we do not claim it is uniform. Some registers are published under an open licence that permits broad reuse; others attach conditions, and some are protected by the sui generis database right, which belongs to the body that produced them. National rules on the reuse of public sector information apply to several of them, and VIES has conditions of its own. We hold no rights over any of those source databases and grant you none: where a source permits more than this clause does, your entitlement comes from that source's own licence and not from us, and it is worth reading it before relying on it. Conversely, you must not use what you obtain here in a way a source prohibits.

Distinct from all of that: the API, its software, its documentation, and the database we build — the imports, the derivations, the normalisations and the aggregations that turn scattered registers into one queryable record — are ours. These Terms grant you a right to use the Service and its output as described above, and transfer no right over any of it.

11. Liability

To the extent permitted by law, our total liability, for all claims combined, is limited to the fees you paid in the twelve months preceding the event giving rise to the claim, and we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss (lost revenue, lost data, lost business, reputational harm). Within the same limits, this excludes in particular any loss arising from an error, omission, staleness or unavailability attributable to a national register or to VIES, as set out in section 9. This limitation does not apply to gross or wilful misconduct, to personal injury, or to any liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited. It is also without effect on liability arising under the GDPR, which has its own regime and which no contract can set aside or cap.

12. Termination

You may cancel your subscription at any time from the console, with no notice and no fee. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current monthly period, which you have already paid for: until then the API stays available with the Basic quota, after which the account automatically falls back to the Free plan, with no pro-rata refund. Your API keys remain valid and keep working within the Free plan's quota.

Cancelling the subscription does not delete the account. Deleting the account is a separate action, available from the billing page. It revokes all your API keys immediately, which stop answering within a minute, and removes your personal data from the active database. It does not, however, erase everything about you at the same instant: data whose retention remains necessary — logs, within the published periods, and invoices and accounting records for their legal period — survives in restricted archive until those periods end, and is then destroyed; technical backups follow their own 30-day rotation. The detail is in section 7 of the Privacy Policy.

Self-service deletion from the console is available once no paid subscription is running, so that an account is never erased while Stripe is still billing it — cancel the subscription first, or wait for the period to end. That is a constraint of the button, not of your rights: your right to erasure under Article 17 of the GDPR is exercisable at any time, subscription or no subscription, by writing to julien.maulny@tuta.io. We then cancel the subscription and erase the account ourselves, subject only to the exceptions Article 17(3) provides — chiefly the accounting records we are legally required to keep.

We may suspend or terminate an account that breaches these Terms or applicable law, as well as in the event of persistent non-payment under the conditions set out in section 7.

13. Governing law

These Terms are governed by French law. Failing an amicable resolution, and to the extent permitted by applicable law, the courts of Paris, France have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them. This clause does not displace any mandatory rule of international or national jurisdiction that applies to you.

14. Changes to these terms

We may update these Terms from time to time; the date at the top reflects the latest revision. Three kinds of change take effect on publication, because none of them alters what you owe or what you get: an editorial change (a clarification, a corrected link); a technical or security change that does not reduce the service or your rights; and a change required by law or by a supervisory authority, which takes effect on the date that law or decision imposes.

A substantial change is one that alters the price, the monthly quota, the scope of the Service, or your obligations under these Terms. It is notified to you by email at least 30 days before the effective date stated in the notification. If you do not accept it, you may cancel free of charge before that date, under the conditions set out in section 12. A substantial change is never applied retroactively to a period already paid for: a new price takes effect only at the renewal following its effective date.

15. Contact

Questions about these Terms: julien.maulny@tuta.io.