# Sirenic or the free company-search API

Let us say it up front: to resolve a name to an identifier, this public API is free and excellent, and there is no reason to pay us — not even the price of our own search route. This comparison is about knowing where it stops, and we measured that with a real call rather than by reading its docs.

## What API Recherche d'entreprises (annuaire-entreprises) does better than us

Let us start there, because it is what decides half the cases — and because a comparison where the competitor never wins anything does not deserve to be read.

- It is **free**. To “find the company number of a business whose name I know”, nothing justifies paying anything — not even our $0.001.
- Its **52 criteria** and quality flags (energy-renovation certification, training accreditation, organic, social economy, mission-driven company…) go further than our search on several axes.
- Its `/near_point` geographic search has no equivalent in our catalogue.

## When to use the free API — and pay us nothing

- You want to **find a company number** from a name or address. Do it there. Free, key-less, MIT-licensed.
- You are searching on criteria it has and we do not: it exposes **52 criteria**, including quality flags (energy certification, training accreditation, organic, social economy, mission-driven company).
- You need a **geographic search** around a point: its dedicated endpoint has no equivalent on our side.
- Your volume fits within **7 requests per second** per IP — bearing in mind the docs state this is not guaranteed throughput and that under heavy load “priority is given to internal systems and public services”.

## API Recherche d'entreprises (annuaire-entreprises): what we found

Surveyed on 2026-08-19, source: [https://recherche-entreprises.api.gouv.fr/openapi.json](https://recherche-entreprises.api.gouv.fr/openapi.json). Every line is verifiable by you, at the same address.

- **Free, key-less, account-less**, MIT licence. Only two entry points: `/search` and `/near_point`.
- Rate: “**at most 7 requests per second**” per IP address and 30 per second per ASN — the docs warn this “is not a guaranteed throughput” and that under heavy use “priority is given to internal systems and public services”.
- **25 results per page maximum** (`per_page`), but 52 search criteria: it is a genuinely rich search engine.
- The documentation says so itself: this API “**does not give access to the complete data** of the Sirene database, only to searching for a company by name or address”.
- On financials, a real call on 2026-08-19 for Danone returns `{"2024": {"ca": 27376000000, "resultat_net": 0}}`: **two fields, one year** — with a net result published as 0 where the value is in fact missing.
- The VAT number is **computed** and served (`tva: ["FR27552032534"]`), but it is not **validated** against the European VIES system.

## What Sirenic does differently

- **Pay per call, no account, no key.** A `402` call, a settlement in USDC or EURC, the response. No sign-up, no contract, no IP address to declare, no expiring credits. 79 routes are reachable that way.
- **An upstream outage closes the route.** We answer `503` and cancel the payment rather than serve a degraded response. A registry snapshot that is too old also closes the route that reads it, instead of selling dead data.
- **Ed25519-signed responses.** You can prove months later what was served to you, and when.
- **Per-block provenance.** Each block of a file declares its official registry and as-of date, rather than a blanket “official sources” claim.
- **Annual accounts in depth.** Where the survey above shows two fields for one year, we serve every filed year with detailed tax-form line items — and our scorecard distinguishes an **absence** from a **zero**, which is exactly the trap that `resultat_net: 0` sets for a naive consumer.
- **VAT validated, not merely computed.** A number derived from the company identifier does not tell you whether it is active today. We validate it **live** against VIES and return the consultation identifier as auditable proof.
- **What it does not serve at all**: filed documents, sanctions screening, regulator authorisations, default-risk scoring, public contracts and expiries, European registers, IBAN checking, sector statistics, daily monitoring.
- **Export pagination.** Our prospecting route returns 100 companies per page, one payment per page — on a sector export, that changes the shape of the work more than the price.

## The foundation, in measured figures

Measured in our database on 2026-08-19: 29,922,486 company numbers and 43,896,818 establishments, 6,542,232 financial years across 1,586,046 companies, 3,402,583 detailed tax-form line items, 9,196,396 registry filings, 765,960 public contracts of which 173,633 expire within 18 months, 130,165 names across 6 official sanctions lists, 47,731 authorisations from 9 authorities, 138,020 regulated industrial sites and 2,934 sectors with statistics.

> ⚠️ These are a **dated snapshot from 2026-08-19**, not a live counter. We republish them at each measurement rather than round them up.

## How this comparison is built

Every fact carries its **survey date** and its **source address**, so that you can contradict it. Nothing is extrapolated: what we could not survey is marked as not surveyed rather than guessed. And every page names what the compared service does better than us — a comparison without that section is not a comparison.

If you spot an error or a fact that has become false, write to [contact@sirenic.eu](mailto:contact@sirenic.eu?subject=Comparison%20correction): we will correct the page and its survey date.

## How you pay

Every route is paid **per call**, in USDC or EURC on the Base network, over the x402 protocol: no account to create, no API key, no subscription. The first call returns a `402` quote your client settles, then replays the call. A failed call is never billed.

Would you rather have a euro invoice and prepaid credits? That is **in preparation**, and we will not announce a date until it is open. Write to [contact@sirenic.eu](mailto:contact@sirenic.eu?subject=Euro%20credit%20packs) and we will let you know when it opens.

Paid responses are **Ed25519-signed**: you can later prove what was served to you, and when. The whole catalogue is free to read in the [OpenAPI document](https://api.sirenic.eu/openapi.json) and in [llms.txt](https://api.sirenic.eu/llms.txt).

**One call, end to end**

```
# Client x402 (npm) — le devis 402 est réglé et l'appel rejoué automatiquement
npx x402-fetch https://api.sirenic.eu/v1/entreprise/552032534

# Ou en MCP, dans Claude Code / Cursor
claude mcp add --transport http sirenic https://api.sirenic.eu/mcp
```

## Routes used and pricing

| Route | Price | What it returns |
| --- | --- | --- |
| `/v1/entreprise/{siren}/finances` | $0.01 | Financials of a French company from annual accounts filed at the INPI registry, with Banque de France ratios: revenue, EBITDA, net income, debt ratio, financial autonomy — one entry per fiscal year. Includes the full structured financial statements line items (liasse fiscale tax form, incl. balance sheet) as keyed by INPI, for up to the 20 latest fiscal years. A perimetre_comptable block states whether figures are statutory or consolidated, and flags series where the source conflates the two. |
| `/v1/tva/verifier/{numero}` | $0.003 | EU VAT validation against the official VIES service: validate any intra-community VAT number (all member states) for compliance and due diligence. This tax id check is the tax half of verify supplier before payment, and a required check under the e-invoicing mandate France September 2026. Returns valid/invalid/unavailable status with the VIES consultation identifier as proof — VAT number validation usable across Europe for KYB and supplier onboarding. |
| `/v1/prospection` | $0.02 | French B2B prospecting and lead generation over the full official French company registry (29.8M companies): build targeted company lists with multi-criteria filters — NAF/APE activity code, departement or postal-code prefix, legal form, workforce bracket, company age, active RGE environmental certification, gender-equality index. Returns 100 active companies per page; each page is one payment. Combine filters to narrow a market segment into fresh, registry-grade company lists for France. |
| `/v1/sanctions/check` | $0.02 | Sanctions screening (AML/KYC): screen a person or company name against 6 official watchlist sources — UN consolidated, EU FSF, US OFAC SDN, UK Sanctions List, French national asset-freeze register, Swiss SECO list — six official lists in one call. Fuzzy watchlist matching with a 0-100 confidence score per hit — never a bare yes/no. Each list reports its entry count, publication date and what that date means. One AML screening call covers UN, EU, OFAC, UK, FR and CH. |

> ⚠️ Screening never returns a bare yes/no: every hit carries a 0-to-100 confidence score. Politically exposed persons are not served.

## Frequently asked questions

### So why does your own search route exist?

So it can be called in the same transaction as the rest, by an agent that pays per call and does not want two integrations, two error-handling paths and two rate regimes. If that convenience is worthless to you, use the free API: we would rather tell you than let you pay for nothing.

### Is the net result of 0 a fault on their side?

It is a characteristic of the upstream data, not an implementation fault: the source sometimes publishes 0 where the value is missing. What matters is what the consumer does with it: treating that 0 as a measured value manufactures wrong analyses, and it is a trap we had to fix on our own side too.

### Can I combine the two?

That is the setup we recommend: resolve names to identifiers with the free API, then call our routes only on the identifiers you keep. You then pay only for what it cannot do.

## Take it further

- [See a real response (free)](https://api.sirenic.eu/exemples/entreprise-siren-finances.json)
- [Get the quote for /v1/entreprise/{siren}/finances](https://api.sirenic.eu/v1/entreprise/552032534/finances)
- [Read the route reference](https://api.sirenic.eu/en/api)
- [Get notified about euro packs](mailto:contact@sirenic.eu?subject=Euro%20credit%20packs)

## Read next

- [Sirenic or API Entreprise (DINUM)](https://api.sirenic.eu/en/compare/sirenic-or-api-entreprise-if-you-are-public-body)
- [Sirenic or Pappers: which one for which need](https://api.sirenic.eu/en/compare/sirenic-or-pappers-credits-versus-pay-per-call-compared)

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Volume figures on this page were measured in our database on 2026-08-19. They are dated snapshots, not live counters.

Full catalogue : https://api.sirenic.eu/