Pappers
👤 Pierre Fruchard & Romain Banchetti (Already ran Coover, insurance brokerage hungry for French company data — felt the pain, had cash to bootstrap Pappers.)🌐 site𝕏LinkedIn
France opened its company registry as free data in 2020. Pappers built the best UI on top and gave it all away.
Will it work? · our read
Radical freemium. Public data anyone can pull, but Pappers turned 2020's open-data window into the default free lookup for French firms — and made the paying 1% cover everything, unfunded.
01How the money moves
Ingest free open-gov registry data on 3.6M+ French firms
→
Give it away free with better UX to 3-4M visitors/month
→
Sell API, exports and alerts to B2B (AXA, Qonto, Bpifrance)
02The numbers
3.6M+
French firms indexed
pappers.fr
3-4M
monthly visitors
press
$0
outside funding
founder
Income statement filed confidential, so revenue is undisclosed. The 2024 net profit of about $0.53M (€492,823) and zero funding are filed/stated facts. pappers.fr filing
2024 net profit about $0.53M (€492,823), from the RNE filing. Revenue itself undisclosed — income statement filed confidential.
🔒
The facts are free. The judgment is for members.
You've seen how the money moves, the numbers, and every source — free, on all 365 cases, always. Members get the part you can't look up: why it won · where the moat really is · how it dies · how it beats its rivals — plus the 🚀 launchpad prompt that turns any case into a plan for your business.
Sources stay public, always · cancel anytime · 14-day refund
(demo: preview the full teardown)Sourcesupdated · daily
Compta-Online — interview with co-founder Pierre Fruchard: bootstrap, freemium, '1% funds 99%'MagStartup — Pappers, the profitable 'radical freemium' legaltech (open data, B2B clients, verticals)Pappers.fr — Pappers SAS filing: 2024 net profit 492,823 EUR (income statement confidential)Annuaire des Entreprises — France's own free official company-data portal (the 'dies' threat)
Revenue is genuinely private: Pappers files its income statement confidentially, so no chiffre d'affaires is public. The headline is the DISCLOSED 2024 net profit (€492,823, about $0.53M) from the balance-sheet filing — first-party and verified. Zero outside funding is founder-stated and consistent with filings. Traffic (3-4M/month), client names (AXA, Qonto, Bpifrance) and indexed-firm counts come from the founder and press, not audited figures. Rival bars are a rough read of visibility, not measured market share. No revenue number is invented; the $ figure is an FX conversion of the filed euro profit. We never score you.