Bank of Russia vs VATComply.com

This is the Central Bank of the Russian Federation's raw XML data feed, not a modern REST API — it exposes daily and historical official ruble exchange rates alongside adjacent datasets like precious metals prices, interbank rates, deposit rates, and currency swap rates. Requests are parameterized with simple date-range query strings, and the site even ships legacy sample code in Visual Basic and PHP, reflecting its origins as an early-2000s government data service.

VATcomply bundles several EU compliance primitives behind one free, keyless API: VIES-backed VAT number validation, current VAT rates for all 27 EU member states, daily ECB foreign-exchange reference rates with history back to January 1999, IP-based geolocation, and IBAN validation. Rather than gating access behind an API key, it simply rate-limits anonymous callers, and it ships both narrative documentation on its homepage and a full interactive OpenAPI reference at a separate endpoint.