Quickstart

From zero to your first successful API call in a few minutes. No card required — the free tier includes 500 requests per month.

1. Create an account

2. Copy your API key

After verification your key is shown once — copy it somewhere safe. It is prefixed uk_live_and is never displayed again; the dashboard only shows the key's prefix. If you lose it, generate a new one from dashboard → API key.

3. Make your first call

Fetch the entity profile for a UK company number (Tesco PLC in this example), passing your key as a bearer token:

curl "https://api.rotuli.co.uk/v1/entity/00445790" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer uk_live_YOUR_KEY"

A successful response is a single normalised JSON object. Every field is always present — null or empty rather than omitted:

{
  "company_number": "00445790",
  "name": "TESCO PLC",
  "status": "active",
  "fetched_at": "2026-07-18T12:00:00Z",
  "sources_checked": ["ch", "ch_psc", "insolvency", "charges", "land"],
  "sources_failed": {},
  "ch": { "...": "Companies House profile" },
  "ch_psc": { "...": "Persons with significant control" },
  "insolvency": { "...": "Insolvency Service cases" },
  "charges": { "...": "Registered charges (security interests)" },
  "land_holdings": [ "..." ],
  "risk_signals": {
    "score": 0,
    "score_is_floor": false,
    "potential_score": 0,
    "coverage": ["ch", "ch_psc", "insolvency", "charges"],
    "flags": [],
    "indeterminate": []
  }
}

4. Read the response correctly

Two fields tell you exactly how complete the response is:

sources_checked — every source the API attempted for this request.
sources_failed — the subset of checked sources that could not be queried, with a reason per source. Empty when everything succeeded.

Successfully consulted sources = sources_checked minus the keys of sources_failed. An unavailable upstream never fails the whole request — you get a partial 200 with the failure recorded. Details on the risk-signals page.

Next steps

API Reference — every endpoint, parameter, and response schema.
Error codes — machine-readable error codes and retry semantics.
MCP server — connect an AI agent natively instead of writing HTTP calls.
Rate limits — monthly quotas per tier and how to upgrade.