swissco

Swiss company data from the shell. Look a company up by UID, search 790,000 of them by name or by what they say they do, list gazette publications, or watch a list of companies for change.

uvx swissco lookup CHE-444.420.929

No signup, no API key, no config file. Two federal open-data sources do the work: Zefix on LINDAS for the commercial register, and the Amtsblattportal for the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce.

Built and maintained by Prospex, a Swiss B2B sales intelligence platform.

Install

uvx swissco --help          # run it without installing
pip install swissco         # or install it

Python 3.14 or newer.

Commands

Every command takes --format table|json|csv, --limit and --quiet.

swissco lookup

Everything the register publishes about one company.

$ swissco lookup CHE-444.420.929
legal name       Baumberger Bau AG
uid              CHE-444.420.929
chid             CH-036.9.103.786-9
ehra id          1702823
legal form code  0151
legal form       Schweizerische Zweigniederlassung im Handelsregister eingetragen
municipality     Koppigen
canton           BE
address          Hauptstrasse 6, 3425 Koppigen
purpose          Anbieten von Kleintransporte aller Art.
zefix uri        https://register.ld.admin.ch/zefix/company/1702823

Accepts CHE-444.420.929, CHE444420929, or the UID buried in other text. The check digit is verified before any request goes out.

swissco search

Companies by legal name or by statutory purpose: how a company describes what it does, in its own words, in the register.

$ swissco search "usinage" --canton VD --limit 5
LEGAL_NAME                             UID              LEGAL_FORM                                         MUNICIPALITY  CANTON  PURPOSE
-------------------------------------  ---------------  -------------------------------------------------  ------------  ------  ------------------------------------------------------------
Atelier roue libre S.A.                CHE-261.821.895  Aktiengesellschaft                                 Penthalaz     VD      La société a pour but l'usinage, la réparation, la révision…
Cute Cut Sàrl                          CHE-403.577.924  Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung GMBH / SARL  Lausanne      VD      la société a pour but toutes activités, notamment la fabric…
DecoupART CNC Sàrl                     CHE-342.723.896  Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung GMBH / SARL  Paudex        VD      la société a pour but tous types de travaux dans les domain…
LAVA Technologies Sàrl en liquidation  CHE-217.431.384  Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung GMBH / SARL  Nyon          VD      la société a pour but: développement de machines d'usinage …
Pousaz Mécanique SA                    CHE-166.712.190  Aktiengesellschaft                                 Oron          VD      La société a pour but l'exploitation d'un atelier mécanique…

--canton takes a two-letter code, --legal-form an eCH-0097 code (0106 is an AG, 0107 a GmbH).

swissco publications

Commercial-register publications from the gazette, in a date range.

swissco publications --canton ZH --since 2026-08-01
swissco publications --canton ZH --since 2026-08-01 --type CAPITAL_INCREASED

Without --type, only the list pages are read: one request per 2,000 publications. With --type, each surviving publication's body is fetched and classified into the eleven event types shab-parser recognises, so narrow the range and the canton first.

Ranges past about ten days are split into windows automatically. The API rejects any request whose page offset reaches 10,000, and the gazette publishes around a thousand commercial-register entries a day.

swissco events

One company's registry history.

swissco events CHE-444.420.929 --since 2024-01-01

The gazette's list pages carry no UID, only a title, so this resolves the UID to a legal name, keeps the publications whose title looks like that name, then fetches those bodies and keeps the events whose own UID matches. The title match decides what is worth downloading; the body's UID decides what is reported. Fetched bodies are cached under the state directory, so an overlapping re-run costs nothing.

swissco watch

What changed since last time.

printf 'CHE-444.420.929\nCHE-105.943.826\n' > uids.txt
swissco watch uids.txt --state ~/.swissco/

Each company is compared by fingerprint, a digest over its identity, address and purpose fields. Exits 10 when something changed and 0 when nothing did, so cron can branch on it:

0 7 * * * swissco watch ~/uids.txt --quiet --format json > ~/changes.json \
          || mail -s "registry changes" me@example.com < ~/changes.json

A UID that has left the dataset is reported as no longer in the dataset, never as deleted. LINDAS carries active entities and is not a historical export, so a UID can leave it for reasons that have nothing to do with the company ending.

Output

--format is the only thing that changes the output. A command piped into jq and the same command watched by a person produce identical bytes, so a script that works in your terminal works in CI.

table and csv are rendered from the same rows that json serialises, so a column cannot appear in one format and be missing from another. Progress notes go to stderr, where --quiet silences them; errors go to stderr as a single JSON object.

Access and terms

SHAB / Amtsblattportal. The REST API is the channel the operator offers for machine access: freely accessible, no authentication for published data, no documented rate limit, page size capped at 2,000. The website UI is disallowed by robots.txt, which does not reach the API. The operator disclaims completeness, and only the signed PDF is legally binding.

Zefix on LINDAS. Published on opendata.swiss, no credentials. Commercial-use terms have never been settled; the dataset page states what applies.

Zefix PublicREST. Requires credentials issued by zefix@bj.admin.ch. Every command here works without them. Supplying them through --user/--password or ZEFIX_USER/ZEFIX_PASSWORD adds capital, status, deletion date, former names and corporate relations to lookup, and a name-prefix search to search.

Being a good citizen

These are small public services run by federal offices. swissco sends one request every 0.5 seconds at most, backs off exponentially on failure, and identifies itself with a real User-Agent carrying this repository's URL. --interval can raise that floor and cannot lower it.

Built on

Both are MIT and maintained alongside this one. swissco is the shell over them.

Watching more than a list

swissco watch from cron is the free version of what Prospex sells. Prospex watches the whole register continuously, joins it to hiring, funding, tenders and web signals, and tells you which of those changes is worth a call. If a cron job and a UID list cover it, this tool is all you need.

License

MIT