Northwind Cloud

Cutting VAT validation from three vendors to one call

Replaced a patchwork of national lookups with a single verify call, and stopped reconciling three different response shapes.

Company

Northwind Cloud

Focus

VAT

Products

VAT Search

Integration

REST API

Illustrative example. Northwind Cloud is a fictional company used to show how Stargate is typically adopted. It is not a real customer reference.

Before Stargate

A separate national lookup per market, each with its own contract
Three response shapes normalised by hand before storage
Monthly minimums paid whether or not calls were made

With Stargate

One verify call, one schema, one key
Responses stored as returned — no per-country mapping
Prepaid credits drawn only on billable responses

The starting point

Northwind Cloud validated VAT numbers across several European markets, each through a different national source. Every integration had its own auth, its own response shape and its own failure modes, and the mapping layer between them had quietly become the most brittle part of the pipeline.

What changed

Moving to a single gateway call collapsed the mapping layer entirely. Because responses are field-filtered against entitlements frozen to the key, the shape stayed stable as coverage expanded — so onboarding a new market stopped being an engineering task.

Where it landed

Validation now runs inline during onboarding rather than as a nightly batch, and spend tracks actual usage because credits are only drawn on billable responses. Failed lookups and no-match results cost nothing.

One call, one schema. Adding a market stopped being an engineering ticket.

Illustrative quote — not attributed to a real customer.

Build the same integration

One key, one schema, and a sandbox that returns the same shapes as production.