The French Government Built net-entreprises.fr With Machine-to-Machine APIs. Then Told No One.
For twenty-five years, the French government has been building machine-to-machine connections between your business and every agency it reports to. The endpoints are documented, certified, live, and free to connect to. Your accounting software connects to them every month. Nobody in the software industry found it necessary to tell you.
What net-entreprises.fr actually is
Here is the infrastructure that runs French business administration: net-entreprises.fr is a government portal, launched in 2001 and operated jointly by social security agencies including URSSAF (the body that collects your company's social contributions), that accepts machine-to-machine filings from certified software. Its primary function today is DSN — the Déclaration Sociale Nominative, the monthly payroll declaration that every French employer files for each employee. It processes 28 million of these declarations per month from employers across France, received directly from software without any human typing a form.
Every DSN your company submits goes to net-entreprises.fr through a protocol called NEODeS — a standardized digital file format that any certified software can send automatically. The same platform handles DPAE (Déclaration Préalable à l'Embauche — the pre-hiring declaration you must file before each new employee's first day, with a €1,068 fine per undeclared worker). From 2027, DPAE migrates fully onto the DSN signalement system — meaning even the last manual pre-hire steps get absorbed into the same automated filing path.
The information that never left the developer documentation
Nobody told you this. It was not secret. net-entreprises.fr has had a public developer portal with API specifications since the machine-to-machine filing paths opened. The government sent communications about it — to software developers. Not to the 4 million French micro-entreprises that pay monthly to access the result.
Ask who benefits from that asymmetry. Sage built a €300 million annual business in France by connecting to net-entreprises.fr for their customers. Pennylane has 800,000 customers at €14-149 per month doing the same. Cegid reported €967 million in revenue for 2024. All of them connect to the same free government API. None of their marketing materials mention that the infrastructure they connect to costs zero per transaction to access.
That information gap is not an oversight. The software industry benefits from the gap. If every French business owner knew that net-entreprises.fr provides free, direct machine-to-machine API connections to any certified developer, the value proposition of paying €80-150 per month for access to those connections looks very different.
The narrow certification club
Only 47 companies currently hold EDIFICAS certification — the technical accreditation required for direct electronic tax filing via the EDI protocol (the system that connects to impots.gouv.fr for VAT declarations, corporate tax, and other filings to the French tax authority). Not because the certification is impossible to obtain — it has clear technical requirements. Because obtaining it requires engineering investment that only companies with sufficient revenue have historically had reason to make.
Sage has EDIFICAS certification. Cegid has it. Pennylane is working toward it. The certification is a real bottleneck for direct tax filing — Liberté is pursuing it as a planned milestone before and after its Q2 2026 launch, and will be transparent about which filing paths are direct API connections and which are pending certification. The 47-company figure is not permanent. It reflects who invested in the certification when the business case required a paying customer base first.
Why the mandates keep coming
French government policy on business declarations has moved consistently in one direction since 2001: more automation, less manual filing. DSN replaced 24 separate social declarations. E-invoicing under Chorus Pro is becoming mandatory for B2B transactions from 2026-2027 — meaning businesses that issue invoices to other businesses will need to send them through a government-certified format, automatically. The DPAE pre-hire declaration moves onto DSN signalement in 2027.
From the government's perspective, each of these mandates achieves two things: it reduces error rates in declarations (machine-to-machine filings have far fewer transcription mistakes than manual portal entry) and it increases declaration completeness (automated filing means fewer businesses missing deadlines through oversight). The trajectory is not accidental. Each new mandate makes manual filing more painful and automated connection more necessary.
What Sage's 94% renewal rate actually measures
A 94% annual renewal rate sounds impressive. Sage France achieves that with its SME subscribers — and not because 94% of customers are enthusiastic about the product. The renewal rate reflects switching costs, not satisfaction. Most customers find that reconfiguring payroll data, reconnecting government portal certifications, and retraining staff costs more time and disruption than just continuing to pay the monthly fee.
Reverse-engineer that number and what appears is a business model built on inertia. The switching cost is high because Sage holds the historical payroll data, the convention collective configurations (the industry-specific labor rules that affect how payroll is calculated), and the filing history. That data is technically portable — the FEC export format, required by law, ensures your accounting data can be extracted. The practical difficulty is that nobody has made rebuilding on a different platform simple enough to be worth the disruption.
Liberté's answer to this is not to claim switching is effortless. The answer is that the ongoing cost of staying — €89-150 per month, indefinitely, for access to free government APIs — is the number that changes the calculation over time.
What Q2 2026 makes possible
Connecting to the same government infrastructure is what Liberté offers at Q2 2026 launch: net-entreprises.fr for DSN, PSD2 Open Banking for bank reconciliation — the EU banking regulation that mandates free machine-to-machine access to your business bank account data. The DPAE filing path. At zero cost to the user.
Before Q2 2026, every month of accounting software subscription is a month of paying for access to infrastructure you already own as a French taxpayer. Starting Q2 2026, you have an alternative that costs nothing, connects to the same APIs, and treats business administration as infrastructure — the same way the government treated it when they built net-entreprises.fr in 2001.
The government built the pipe. The accounting industry charged rent on it for twenty-five years. That period is ending.