Question 1

What is GoodVat?

Accepted Answer

GoodVat is simple, accurate sales tax, VAT, and GST calculation for online sellers — with plugins for Shopify, WooCommerce, and more platforms on the way. Under the hood, it's powered by GoodVat's own address standardization, geocoding, and tax-rate infrastructure, each also available directly as an API for developers who want to build on it themselves.

Question 2

Do you have a Shopify or WooCommerce plugin?

Accepted Answer

Not yet — they're on the roadmap. The Address Standardization API is live today as the first building block; Geocoding and Tax Calculation come next, with ecommerce platform plugins following on top. Create an account to be notified as each ships.

Question 3

What can I use GoodVat for today?

Accepted Answer

The Address Standardization API is live now — parse and standardize free-form address strings into clean, structured components. USA Geocoding and Global Tax Calculation are in development; create an account to be notified when they ship.

Question 4

Is GoodVat production-ready?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Address Standardization runs on a stateless, horizontally-scaled service with a 10ms p99 and a 99.99% uptime SLA, so it's safe to call inline on checkout, signup, and import flows.

Question 5

Who is GoodVat built for?

Accepted Answer

Primarily, online sellers who just want sales tax and VAT handled correctly without thinking about it — that's what the upcoming platform plugins are for. The underlying APIs (address standardization, geocoding, tax calculation) are also available directly to engineering teams who want to build on GoodVat's infrastructure themselves.

Question 6

What is address standardization?

Accepted Answer

It is the process of turning a messy, free-form address string (typed by a customer, scraped from a form, or pulled from a database) into structured components (house number, street, unit, city, state, postcode, country) and fully expanded canonical string variations (expansions) that downstream systems can compare, match, search, and route on.

Question 7

How does GoodVat Address Standardization API work?

Accepted Answer

A statistical CRF (Conditional Random Field) sequence labeling model segments free text into semantic components regardless of word order or format. Concurrently, a statistical multi-lingual token expansion engine standardizes abbreviations and generates canonical string variations. An AI resolution layer handles the gnarliest inputs: missing unit numbers, transliterated street names, and formats a rules-based parser has never seen.

Question 8

Does it correct misspellings and expand abbreviations?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Abbreviations ("St" → "Street", "Ave" → "Avenue", "Ste" → "Suite", "Rd" → "Road", "Blvd" → "Boulevard"), spelled-out numbers ("Quatre-vingt-douze" → "92"), Roman numerals, and locale-specific formats are resolved into clean, canonical forms in both individual fields and the returned expansions array across 60+ languages.

Question 9

What is the expansions array and how should I use it?

Accepted Answer

The expansions array delivers a list of canonical, fully expanded string variations of the input address where abbreviations and street types are standardized. You can use it as a deterministic match key for Master Data Management (MDM) golden records, exact CRM entity deduplication in Salesforce and HubSpot, and search indexing in Elasticsearch, Algolia, or PostgreSQL.

Question 10

How does GoodVat compare to hosting libpostal directly?

Accepted Answer

Libpostal is a state-of-the-art C library, but hosting it in production requires over 2GB of memory per instance, custom C compilation, and complex scaling logic that fails on serverless functions. GoodVat delivers a hosted, horizontally scaled libpostal core with a 10ms p99 latency, 99.99% uptime SLA, and an AI resolution layer for $5/month with unlimited requests.

Question 11

What languages and countries are supported?

Accepted Answer

Address parsing works across 60+ languages and scripts, trained on address data covering every region GoodVat serves, not just English-speaking markets.

Question 12

What fields does the API return?

Accepted Answer

The response includes an expansions array (canonical string variants) plus structured fields present in the input: houseNumber, road, unit, level, staircase, entrance, poBox, postcode, suburb, cityDistrict, city, island, stateDistrict, state, countryRegion, country, and worldRegion. Only fields the parser is confident about are included.

Question 13

How accurate is Address Standardization?

Accepted Answer

The parsing engine achieves 99.5% accuracy on full-address parses. See the full field reference and worked examples on the Address Standardization docs page.

Question 14

What is the latency?

Accepted Answer

A 10ms p99. The service is stateless and horizontally scaled specifically so it can sit inline in a request path (checkout, signup, search) without adding perceptible delay.

Question 15

Does it verify that an address actually exists (deliverability)?

Accepted Answer

No. Address Standardization parses and standardizes the structure of an address string and expands its tokens. It does not check the address against a postal carrier delivery-point database. If you need deliverability verification, that is a distinct capability from standardization, and one we point you to a carrier-specific tool for today.

Question 16

What is the difference between address standardization, validation, and verification?

Accepted Answer

Standardization parses a free-form string into structured, canonical components and expansions so the same address always resolves to the same output (making it a reliable match key). Validation checks that an address conforms to postal formatting rules. Verification confirms the address exists and can receive mail against a carrier database. GoodVat does standardization, the parsing and canonicalization layer that data matching, MDM, and deduplication depend on.

Question 17

Can I pass language or country hints?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Both query parameters are optional. Pass them to sharpen results on ambiguous input, or omit them and let the model infer language and country from the address itself.

Question 18

How do I get an API key?

Accepted Answer

Create one from the API Keys page in your dashboard. Each key gets a human-readable name and an optional expiry, and the raw secret is shown exactly once, at creation time.

Question 19

What format are GoodVat API keys in?

Accepted Answer

Keys look like gv_live_ followed by 43 characters of cryptographically random entropy, e.g. gv_live_7Kx2mPqR9sTvW4nJ8hL3bC6dF1gY0aZeXuN5oQiT. They're stored server-side as a hash, never in plaintext.

Question 20

How do I authenticate requests?

Accepted Answer

Pass your API key as a Bearer token in the Authorization header: Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY. See the Authentication docs for full examples in cURL, Node, and Python.

Question 21

Does one API key work across all products?

Accepted Answer

A key automatically works for any product your organization is subscribed to — there's no separate per-key setup. If your org isn't subscribed to a product, requests to that product's endpoints return a 403, even with a valid key.

Question 22

What should I do if a key is leaked?

Accepted Answer

Revoke it from the API Keys dashboard and issue a new one immediately. There's no way to rotate a key in place — deleting the compromised one and creating a fresh one is the only path.

Question 23

Do you have official SDKs?

Accepted Answer

Not yet — the API is deliberately simple REST + JSON, callable from any HTTP client (fetch, requests, etc.) without a heavyweight SDK dependency.

Question 24

How much does Address Standardization cost?

Accepted Answer

$5 a month for unlimited requests, subject to fair-use rate limits to protect the service. No per-request metering, no overage bills.

Question 25

How does pricing work across products?

Accepted Answer

Each GoodVat product is priced independently — you only pay for the products you turn on, and each has one clear, flat plan rather than usage-based tiers.

Question 26

When will USA Geocoding and Global Tax Calculation be priced?

Accepted Answer

Pricing for both will be announced when each product ships. Create an account to be notified the moment they go live.

Question 27

Do you offer volume, annual, or enterprise plans?

Accepted Answer

If your usage is unusual or you need an SLA beyond the standard 99.99%, get in touch after signing up and we'll work something out.

Question 28

Can I use Address Standardization for tax jurisdiction determination?

Accepted Answer

Yes — standardizing an address into clean state, city, and postcode fields first is a common pre-step before feeding it into a tax engine, so jurisdiction lookups run against structured components instead of a raw string.

Question 29

Can I use it for shipping and logistics?

Accepted Answer

Yes — standardizing addresses into carrier-ready fields (house number, street, unit, postcode) before label generation cuts failed and misrouted deliveries. See the Shipping & Logistics use case for details.

Question 30

Can I use it for fraud detection or KYC?

Accepted Answer

Yes — standardizing every submitted address to the same canonical form turns exact-match comparison into a reliable signal for linking accounts or matching proof-of-address documents. See the Fraud & Risk Scoring and KYC & Identity Verification use cases.

Question 31

Can I use it to deduplicate CRM or CDP records?

Accepted Answer

Yes — records that resolve to identical houseNumber / road / unit / postcode values after standardization can be automatically flagged or merged. See the CRM Deduplication use case.

Question 32

Can I use it for master data management (MDM) or building a single customer view?

Accepted Answer

Yes — canonical address expansions make a reliable, deterministic match key for MDM and data matching pipelines. Standardize every address on the way into CRM, ERP, billing, and support systems, then match and merge records on that shared key to build a golden record / single customer view without relying on fuzzy string matching.

Question 33

Where can I see all the supported use cases?

Accepted Answer

The Address Standardisation docs list use cases across tax, shipping, geocoding, fraud, KYC, CRM, checkout, insurance, direct mail, real estate, emergency dispatch, and census/voter registration — each with a worked request/response example.

Question 34

What's the uptime SLA?

Accepted Answer

99.99% on Address Standardization, backed by a stateless, horizontally-scaled architecture.

Question 35

Where can I check system status?

Accepted Answer

status.goodvat.com has live status and incident history for every GoodVat service.

Question 36

How do I get support or report a bug?

Accepted Answer

Sign in to your dashboard and reach out from there, or get in touch through the contact options linked in the footer. For volume or SLA needs beyond the standard plan, mention that up front.

Frequently asked questions

General

Address Standardization

API & Authentication

Pricing & Billing

Use Cases

Reliability & Support

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