Data Validation · head-to-head
US Extract vs VATlayer
Smarty's US Extract API scans arbitrary blocks of text — emails, PDFs-turned-text, scraped web pages, free-text form fields — to locate and validate US postal addresses embedded inside them, rather than requiring the caller to already know where an address starts and ends. Each match comes back with the same standardized, USPS-checked components (city, state, ZIP+4, delivery-point data) as Smarty's dedicated street-address API, plus the surrounding text offsets. It shares billing and account access with the rest of Smarty's address-data platform, so an existing Smarty key also works here.
vatlayer checks whether an EU VAT registration number is currently valid and, where the member state's VIES service exposes it, returns the registered company name and address alongside real-time and historical VAT/EU-VAT rate lookups by country. It's one of the apilayer family of JSON micro-APIs, sharing that group's account and billing platform. Requests are plain HTTPS GET calls authenticated with an `access_key` query parameter — no headers or OAuth handshake required.
| US Extract | VATlayer | |
|---|---|---|
| Authentication | API Key | API Key |
| Pricing | freemium | freemium |
| Formats | JSON | JSON |
| CORS | yes | yes |
| HTTPS | Yes | Yes |