Plenty of tools claim everything happens in your browser. For a VAT checker that claim cannot be fully true, and here is precisely why, and precisely what we do instead.
Parsing your pasted list, stripping spaces and dots, splitting country codes, building the results table, and generating the CSV all happen locally in your browser. None of that is transmitted anywhere.
Validity can only be confirmed by the European Commission's VIES service, which queries each national tax database live. Browsers are blocked from calling VIES directly (it sends no cross-origin permission headers), so each number is relayed through our own small proxy at api.vatbatch.com and on to the official endpoint at ec.europa.eu.
What the proxy sends: one country code and one VAT number per request, plus your own VAT number if you supplied it to obtain consultation numbers.
What the proxy keeps: nothing. It holds no database, writes no logs of VAT numbers, and stores nothing between requests. Each request is forwarded, the answer is returned to your browser, and the memory is gone.
The tool sets no cookies, uses no third-party analytics or advertising scripts, and asks for no account or email address. Aggregate page counts (visits and a few interaction events, e.g. "a check was run") are recorded without cookies and without any personal data — five fixed labels identical for every visitor, no identifiers, nothing that could identify you or your list. Your VAT numbers are never part of this.
Open your browser's developer tools, switch to the Network tab, and run a check. You will see one request per number to api.vatbatch.com/vies — and nothing else. That is the whole data flow, and it is the reason this page exists rather than a vaguer promise.
A company VAT number is business data, not usually personal data — but a sole trader's VAT number can be. Since we retain nothing and identify nobody, there is no stored record to request, correct or erase. Correspondence sent to [email protected] is kept only as long as needed to answer it.
Payments are handled entirely by Gumroad, which acts as merchant of record and processes your payment and billing details under its own privacy policy. We receive an order record and a licence key; we never see card details.