Germany has no Companies House
Unlike the UK's free official API, German company data is fragmented across regional courts and published through the Handelsregister and Unternehmensregister — built for humans, not machines. Developers face session-bound forms, strict rate limits, and messy HTML instead of structured data.
The 2024 eGbR update that broke legacy pipelines
In early 2024 Germany introduced the eingetragene Gesellschaft bürgerlichen Rechts (eGbR) and its register (GsR). Many older scrapers and data providers never added support, so they silently miss this entire entity type — a real KYB gap if you're verifying German counterparties today.
What's public, and what isn't
Company identifiers, registration numbers, court, legal form, and status are public by statute (§9 HGB) and exactly what you need for B2B verification. Personal/consumer data is protected under GDPR and should stay out of your pipeline by default.
Getting clean JSON without maintaining scraping infrastructure
Rather than maintaining your own rate-limit handling and keeping up with registry layout changes, you can use a managed extractor. I built an Apify actor for German company registers — it stays strictly within the portal's rate limits (no evasion), supports all register types including the new eGbR, and returns clean, GDPR-safe JSON at about $4 per 1,000 results:
https://apify.com/pat1987/german-handelsregister-lookup
Piping it into n8n or Python
A single HTTP call with a company name returns the registration number, court, legal form, and status as JSON — drop it straight into an n8n HTTP node or a Python requests call for lead enrichment or KYB. Happy to answer questions in the comments.
Top comments (0)