Comparison
Build it yourself, or use Apier?
You can build the integration to Norwegian public infrastructure — Altinn 3, Maskinporten, Brønnøysund, Skatteetaten — entirely yourself. The question is never whether it is possible, but 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 — 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 authentication, the delegation handling, and the normalisation across upstreams. Your integration sends one Bearer API key; the rest — tokens, scopes, retries, normalised responses — is resolved in the execution layer.
Run the numbers: build vs. Apier
A rough estimate — not a quote. Adjust the numbers; the build cost shows as rounded ranges beside the matching Apier tier's exact annual price.
- Build it yourself — first year
- NOK 155,000–435,000
- Build it yourself — annual maintenance
- NOK 55,000–60,000
- Build it yourself — first-year total
- NOK 210,000–495,000
- Apier Starter — per year
- NOK 5,988
Assumptions
- Build: 30–80 hours per registry/endpoint × your hourly rate.
- Maskinporten + delegation: one-time setup 40–120 hours × your hourly rate.
- 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.
- How the matching tier is chosen: by endpoint count (1 → Free, 2–3 → Starter, 4–6 → Professional, 7+ → Enterprise); handling Maskinporten + delegation yourself floors it at Starter (Free is read-only).
- 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 execution layer on top of it, 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 execution layer: authentication and delegation, normalised responses, reliability, deadlines and receipts — the layer you would otherwise build and maintain yourself.
Related pages
- Company-data APIs vs the execution layer — data vs execution, as a category.
- Pricing — the Apier tiers the calculator matches against.
- 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 delegation flow and the filing path.