# Changelog of German Company KYC 🇩🇪 $5/1k: Handelsregister, HRB, Officers (`tagadanar/german-company-kyc`) Actor - **URL**: https://apify.com/tagadanar/german-company-kyc/changelog.md - **Full Actor documentation**: https://apify.com/tagadanar/german-company-kyc.md ## Changelog ### 2026-09-19 - **A different company is never billed as a match.** When the only register entry a search returned did not resemble the name you gave (for example "Henkel AG" answered with an angling club named Henkel), the row used to ship as `found: true` flagged `nameMismatch`, and was charged. It is now answered as not found, free, with the register's entry attached as `candidate`. Next to a genuine match, such look-alike entries are simply no longer delivered. ### 2026-09-08 - **A run can no longer spend more time than it has.** Every request to the Registerportal booked a flat 60-second timeout with nothing above it counting the clock: one company walks up to five search submissions (two requests each) and up to ten structured-document downloads, and a failed lookup replayed the whole thing on a fresh session — about 3,800 seconds of worst case for a SINGLE company against the 3600-second default run timeout, over a company list with no upper bound. One slow company could therefore end the run by platform kill, which delivers no status message at all. - Every request now plans against the time actually left, politeness delays are never slept past the budget, and no company is started that the run cannot pay for. Companies already looked up stay delivered. - **A company the clock never reached is now its own answer.** It is no longer reported as "not in the Handelsregister" (a claim only a completed search earns) nor as a portal failure: the run says plainly that the result is PARTIAL and names the queries it never asked. - The structured-document (SI) download is now the part that loses its time first. Near the end of the budget a company still ships with its register facts — number, court, status, seat, former names — and the status says the officers and capital were skipped for time, not missing from the register. - A portal response that is not a rate limit and not a server error (a 403, a 404\) now leaves the retry ladder immediately instead of buying the same answer three times at the expense of the companies further down the list. ### 2026-08-30 - **Price cut: $0.15 -> $0.005 per company extracted ($150 -> $5 per 1,000).** The run start fee stays $0.001, not-found queries stay free, and Bronze / Silver / Gold now take 10 / 20 / 30% off the per-company price. - **New `exactMatch` input.** Off (the default) keeps today's behaviour: the portal's keyword containment, so "Zalando SE" also returns Zalando BTD 003 GmbH and Connected Retail GmbH. On, the actor uses the register's own exact-name mode (*genaue Firmenbezeichnung*), which returns only entries registered under exactly that name. Verified live on 2026-08-30: "Zalando SE" returns 1 row in exact mode against 25 in containment mode, and the bare word "Zalando" returns 0 — the register really is matching the whole registered name, so leave it off when you are unsure of the spelling. - Every run now ends with a status message built by a pure function from explicit counters. A portal that never opened, a run that gave up after repeated portal failures, and a set of queries the register genuinely has no entry for are now three different messages instead of one: "none of these queries matched a register entry" is reachable only when the portal actually answered. Not-found queries, failed lookups, rows delivered without the structured document and rows flagged `nameMismatch` are each counted and named. - README: the pricing table now carries the real numbers, and `exactMatch`, `includeDeleted` and `pushNotFoundRecords` are documented for the first time. ### 2026-07-17 v0.1.0 - Initial release. Per-company lookups on the Registerportal der Länder (handelsregister.de, free tier, no account): JSF session dance (JSESSIONID + ViewState) isolated in one client module, "Normale Suche" form search, free structured register content (XJustiz "SI" XML) download and parse. - Record: legal name, register type/number/court, EUID, status, legal form, seat, address, phone, business purpose, share capital, founding and articles dates, representation rule, officers with roles (Geschäftsführer, Vorstand, Prokura), former names, entry counts. Unknown XJustiz role codes are delivered raw, never dropped. - Search robustness: register-number + court pinning, exact-phrase then fuzzy name attempts, legal-form expansion and stripping ("AG" vs "Aktiengesellschaft"), result ranking with legal-form synonym normalization. A register-number hit that does not resemble the given name falls back to name search and any delivered doubt is flagged `nameMismatch` (KYC must never silently return the wrong company). Not-found rows are pushed uncharged. - Resilience: sequential polite pacing (1.6 s), one session per run, one fresh-session retry per company, SI download retried once, run aborts after 3 consecutive portal failures. - Fleet conventions: list-input coercion with alias unwrapping, bad input exits SUCCEEDED with a status message, fail-closed billing (charge before push), actor-start floor charged before validation. - Live-tested 2026-07-17: Zalando SE (HRB 158855 B, Charlottenburg, 10 officers, share capital parsed), BioNTech SE resolved to HRB 48720 Mainz by name fallback from a deliberately wrong number (12 officers), fantasy company cleanly not-found, session-retry path exercised live. Peak RSS 109 MB, memory 512 MB (3x measured, plain HTTP, no browser). - Intended pricing (Console, at publish): `company-extract` $0.15 list with Bronze/Silver/Gold tiers (anchor: registry resellers charge EUR 4.50+ per document), `actor-start` $0.001 floor. No proxy input exists; the portal serves plain HTTP clients. - Published 2026-07-17 (we pay platform usage, all-in pricing): `company-extract` $0.15, `actor-start` $0.001, Bronze/Silver/Gold discounts. Measured platform cost $0.34 per 1,000 extracts.