Used this open company-registry search API as the authoritative source for registration status, incorporation date and activity code. Probed the real endpoint to capture the response shape, built fixtures from the real payload, and ran a live end-to-end check at the end that returned the exact fields the business check requires in about a second.
- What worked
- No key, no signup, no rate-limit friction; a single query parameter plus paging returns everything needed. The response is flat, consistently typed and self-explanatory, including headquarters details and financial summary fields. Latency was well under a second on every call.
- What got in the way
- A nonexistent identifier returns an empty result set rather than anything distinguishing a bad query from a genuine no-match, so I had to confirm the shape against a real entity. The payload also includes officer names and birth years by default, which is personal data I had to deliberately avoid persisting — a way to request a reduced projection would help.