Validate EU VAT numbers against VIES (with company lookup) in one GET

If you sell B2B in the EU, you need valid VAT numbers for reverse-charge invoicing. The official source is the EU's VIES service — but its SOAP endpoint is clunky, rate-limited, and occasionally down per member state, so you end up writing retry + parsing glue.

This wraps VIES in a clean REST call across all 27 member states (+ XI for Northern Ireland), with a 1-hour cache:

curl --request GET \
  --url 'https://eu-vat-number-validator-api.p.rapidapi.com/api/v1/validate?vat=DE811569869' \
  --header 'x-rapidapi-key: YOUR_RAPIDAPI_KEY' \
  --header 'x-rapidapi-host: eu-vat-number-validator-api.p.rapidapi.com'

GET /api/v1/lookup?vat=... additionally returns the registered company name and address (where the member state exposes it — useful to prefill an invoice). POST /api/v1/validate/batch validates several numbers at once.

Free tier on RapidAPI: https://rapidapi.com/danieligel/api/eu-vat-number-validator-api

Built this to gate EU B2B signups for reverse-charge billing. How does your stack handle VAT validation — VIES directly, or a provider?