The French Government Wants Machine-to-Machine Filing. They Built the APIs. The Software Industry Ignores Them.
Public Digital Infrastructure Utilization Gap Between Government Investment and Private Sector Adoption
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Net-entreprises.fr processes 28 million DSN declarations per month. DSN — the Déclaration Sociale Nominative — is the monthly social security report every French employer sends to URSSAF (the agency collecting social contributions) for each employee: hours worked, salary paid, contributions due. A free machine-to-machine API handles this filing directly. Your accounting software charges you €80–200 per month to relay your data through it.
That relay is what you're paying for. Not the filing. The relay.
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France has spent years building digital infrastructure to reduce administrative burden on businesses. Net-entreprises.fr holds the API for DSN (monthly social declarations) and DPAE — the Déclaration Préalable à l'Embauche, the pre-hiring declaration required before any new employee's first day. Impots.gouv.fr handles tax filing via EDI protocol, though only around 47 companies in France currently hold EDIFICAS certification — the authorization required to file tax declarations electronically on behalf of clients. For bank reconciliation, PSD2 (the EU banking directive mandating free data access) lets aggregators like Powens connect to 1,800+ banks and stream account data automatically.
All of this infrastructure is free at the source. Built, funded, and maintained with public money. What the market built on top of it is a subscription.
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Sage serves 300,000 French customers at €80–200 per month. Cegid serves 750,000 at similar rates. Pennylane raised €175M at a €3.6B valuation and charges €14–149 per month. All of them connect to the same government APIs. All of them relay your social declarations through net-entreprises.fr, your bank data through PSD2 aggregators, and your tax filings through EDIFICAS-certified EDI processors. Each one charges a monthly fee for connecting you to public infrastructure your taxes already funded.
State the logic plainly: you pay €200/month to file your DSN. The government built a free API for that. You're paying rent on public infrastructure.
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Consider what EDIFICAS certification actually is. The DGFiP (the French tax authority) requires any company that files tax declarations electronically on behalf of clients to hold a special certification. About 47 companies in France hold it. Every French business that wants electronic tax filing must go through one of those 47 intermediaries to access an API built for everyone.
Certification was designed to ensure quality. Scarcity turned it into a toll. At the end of this chain, the entrepreneur pays twice: once as a taxpayer whose contributions funded the API infrastructure, and again as a software customer paying a relay fee to access it.
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Compare two auto-entrepreneurs filing DSN for a single employee. Auto-entrepreneur A uses Sage at €150/month: their social declaration travels from Sage's platform to net-entreprises.fr, their filing history lives in Sage's database, and their data passes through Sage's servers before reaching URSSAF. Auto-entrepreneur B uses Liberté at €0: their declaration goes directly from Liberté to net-entreprises.fr via the official M2M API — same endpoint, same URSSAF, same legal compliance.
Auto-entrepreneur A pays €1,800 per year for that relay. Auto-entrepreneur B pays nothing. Both receive the confirmation from URSSAF. One of them paid €150/month to see it.
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Software vendors have a response to this argument, and it deserves honest consideration: they add real value beyond the relay. Compliance updates when rules change. Error handling when filings are rejected. Support when deadlines approach. Interfaces that make complex processes manageable. That value is genuine.
Worth asking, though: does that value justify €80–200 per month in perpetuity? France improves its APIs each year — better documentation, more reliability, expanded coverage. Maintaining a direct API connection gets easier as the infrastructure matures. Sage's pricing has not followed that curve. A subscription priced as premium work in 2012 costs the same today, for infrastructure substantially cheaper to maintain than it was then. The gap between what the relay costs to run and what vendors charge for it grows wider every year.
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Liberté's model treats the government API layer as infrastructure, not inventory. No relay fee for DSN filing. No monthly charge for DPAE. No premium tier for bank reconciliation. Direct government API connections are in the core product for every user — because Liberté's revenue comes from optional paid services on the marketplace (Stralevo for AI intelligence, Vivalto for CRM, and others), not from charging admission to public infrastructure.
Free the way Android is free: the platform is open to everyone. Optional apps on the store are where the revenue lives.
When you add a new employee in Liberté, what follows is automatic: DPAE filed directly to net-entreprises.fr, mutuelle (health insurance) enrollment triggered, prévoyance (life and disability insurance) set up, payroll configured, and the first DSN updated. One action. Six compliance steps. No browser tab for net-entreprises.fr. No re-entering data that was already in the employment contract.
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A collision is coming, and the date is set.
France's mandatory B2B e-invoicing rollout requires all businesses to issue Factur-X compliant invoices — Factur-X being the structured electronic invoice format the French government has standardized — via Chorus Pro, the government's free e-invoicing platform, on a phased schedule running through 2026 and 2027. Every business on software that doesn't natively support Chorus Pro faces an upgrade or migration on a government deadline. That will be the most expensive software transition French small businesses have navigated in a decade.
Businesses already on platforms that treat compliance infrastructure as baseline — not a premium feature — will handle this as a software update. Businesses on subscription platforms without Chorus Pro integration will discover, at the deadline, that the relay fee they've been paying doesn't cover the new pipe.
Add the DSN M2M API, the DPAE API, PSD2 Open Banking, and Chorus Pro together and the picture resolves: France is building a fully automated compliance infrastructure for businesses, one mandate at a time. Each layer is free to access directly. Each new mandate is another reason to be on a platform that connects natively.
In five years, every major French business filing will have a government API. Businesses on the right platform will pay nothing for compliance infrastructure. Businesses on legacy subscription software will see fees compound as each new mandate adds another billable module. Moving before a regulatory deadline forces it is still a choice. After 2027, it's an emergency.
Your taxes paid for the APIs. Your business shouldn't have to pay again.