charitylookup.uk

What It Is

Open Charity Lookup is a UK charity lookup API. The current version is 2.1, and the documentation states that its database contains “every currently registered UK charity,” with the most recent update in May 2024. It is more of a lightweight data API than a full developer platform, with its core value being that developers can retrieve charity registration information via HTTP endpoints.

Core Capabilities and API

Its main endpoint is GET https://charitylookup.uk/charities/search. It supports searching by charity name, registration number reg_no, and full-field keyword search via term. Results can also be filtered by jurisdiction, with supported values including eng, scot, ni, and all. Returned data includes the registration number, charity name, segmented address, postcode, and full_address, making it suitable for search boxes, registration number validation, charity profile autofill, or organization verification on donation platforms. The lower parameter controls whether results are returned in lowercase.

Pricing and Integration

The captured text does not disclose pricing, authentication methods, rate limits, paid plans, or payment methods, so it is difficult to assess its commercial sustainability or suitability for high-concurrency use cases. The API uses standard HTTP GET requests and JSON responses, is not tied to any specific language or framework, and does not mention any SDKs. For developers, this means integration is straightforward, but they will need to implement their own client wrapper, error handling, retries, caching, and monitoring.

Pros and Cons

Its main advantage is that the interface is very straightforward, with few parameters and clear response fields. The documentation provides a request body, URI examples, response examples, and a parameter table, making it easy to validate usability at low cost. The downside is the lack of production-grade information: there is no explanation of pagination, sorting, error codes, authentication, rate limiting, SLA, data sources, historical data, or support. It also does not state whether the project is open source or can be self-hosted. If used for critical business workflows, stability and data update accuracy should be verified first.

Who It’s For and Access from China

It is suitable for civic tech projects, compliance systems, data cleaning scripts, CRMs, or donation platforms that need to query UK charity information. If used only for occasional lookups or internal data enrichment, it should be relatively easy to adopt; if used in enterprise-grade core processes, additional assessment of service guarantees is needed. The source text does not provide information about access from mainland China, so actual connectivity, cross-border latency, and payment options are unknown. If access is unstable, consider caching results or using official registry data sources as an alternative.