Comparison
Build it yourself, or use Apier?
You can build the integration to Norwegian public infrastructure (Altinn 3, Maskinporten, Brønnøysund, Skatteetaten) entirely yourself. It is possible; the question is what it costs to build and maintain that layer over time.
What a direct integration makes you own
- A machine identity. A virksomhetssertifikat, a Maskinporten client with an RSA keypair, and an Altinn System Register entry, all before a single request authenticates.
- Per-organisation authority. Each organisation you act for must grant a System User delegation scoped to the right access packages. Delegations expire, get revoked, and have to be re-granted on the organisation's side.
- The Altinn 2 → Altinn 3 mapping. An old Altinn 2 role rarely maps one-to-one onto an Altinn 3 access package; getting the mapping wrong fails closed at the gateway.
- Reliability. Token refresh and caching, retries with backoff, rate-limit handling, normalising divergent error shapes, and monitoring for when an upstream is down.
- Ongoing maintenance. Upstream APIs change, deadlines move, and regulations get updated; maintenance does not stop when the build is done.
What Apier owns for you
Apier owns the normalisation across the open registers. Your integration sends one Bearer API key; the rest (caching, retries, normalised responses) is resolved by Apier. Maskinporten authentication and Altinn delegation are not handled by Apier: they stay with the company that acts, in its own name.
Run the numbers: build vs. Apier
A rough estimate, not a quote. Adjust the numbers; the build cost shows as rounded ranges beside Apier's exact published price per metered read.
- Build it yourself — first year
- NOK 105,000–290,000
- Build it yourself — annual maintenance
- NOK 55,000–60,000
- Build it yourself — first-year total
- NOK 160,000–350,000
- Apier — per metered read, prepaid
- 50 øre
Assumptions
- Build: 30–80 hours per registry/endpoint × your hourly rate.
- The comparison covers register reads. Apier does not broker Maskinporten or Altinn on behalf of customers, so no such line is costed on either side.
- Maintenance: hours/month × 12 × your hourly rate × number of client companies.
- Estimate for 1 client company. Only maintenance scales per client; the one-time build is shared across all of them.
- No new subscriptions are sold. Metered company-data reads are paid per call from a prepaid balance, so the yearly Apier cost is your call volume times the per-read price. The calculator does not ask for call volume, so it shows no yearly Apier total.
- Every build figure is rounded to the nearest NOK 5,000 and shown as a range. It is an estimate, not a quote. The Apier price is exact and read from the published pricing.
- No government fees are included; the public APIs are free. See pricing.
FAQ
- Do you resell company data?
- No. The registry data is public and free. We sell the proof on top of it (source, history and receipts), not access to the data.
- Are the government APIs free?
- Yes. Open data from Brønnøysund, Altinn and Skatteetaten is free to use; we put no markup on the data itself.
- What am I paying for, then?
- The proof layer: source and time on every answer, history, signed receipts, normalised responses and reliability, the layer you would otherwise build and maintain yourself.
Related pages
- How much engineering time does one API for Norwegian company data save?
- Company-data APIs vs proof you can keep — data vs proof, as a category.
- Pricing — the per-read price the calculator shows.
- Altinn API, Maskinporten API — the parts of the stack, in detail.
- Documentation and the Apier home page.
Get started
The sandbox is curlable with no signup; the docs walk through the company reads and the signing-authority path.