Product Decisions This Supports
- Polish market entry / localization readiness. Every PL-facing onboarding, checkout, and invoicing flow needs format+checksum validation for PESEL (individual identity), NIP (B2B tax ID), REGON (company registry number), ID card series/number, and Polish IBAN. This package is a compact catalogue of exactly which identifiers matter and what "valid" means for each — useful as a requirements input for the PL launch checklist, regardless of whether the code is used.
- KYC and compliance scope-setting. Deciding what your onboarding actually verifies versus merely validates. This package does checksums only — it does not confirm a PESEL exists, that a NIP is active in the tax registry, or that a bank account is reachable. That distinction is the difference between a "form validation" story and a "verified identity" story in a compliance review, and it should shape both the roadmap and the marketing copy.
- Build vs. buy vs. borrow. With 7 stars, zero dependents, and an archived repository, this is not a "buy." The realistic decision is borrow the algorithms and test vectors versus adopt as a dependency. Treating it as a spec artifact rather than a supplier is the decision this package most cleanly supports.
- Payment and payout risk. IBAN checksum validation (mod-97) on payout/refund flows prevents a class of mis-typed-account support tickets and failed transfers. Cheap to implement, high visible value in support-cost reduction.
- B2B vs. B2C flow branching. NIP/REGON presence is a reliable signal for company accounts, which drives invoice generation, VAT treatment, and self-serve vs. assisted onboarding.
When to Consider This Package
Reasonable to consider when:
- You maintain a legacy Symfony 2/3-era application where a "bundle" is the native integration format and the code may still load as-is.
- You need a reference implementation of the checksum algorithms and edge cases — weighting tables, check digits, 9- vs. 14-digit REGON, PESEL birthdate/gender encoding — to validate your own implementation or to derive test fixtures.
- You are vendor-forking: copying the validation logic into your own codebase under a permissive license (verify the license file before doing so) and taking ownership of it.
- The scope is genuinely Poland-only and the flows are low-stakes (a marketing form, not a regulated KYC gate).
Look elsewhere when:
- You are on Laravel 9+/PHP 8.1+. The package is packaged as a bundle, which typically implies Symfony container/DI conventions rather than a Laravel service provider; expect integration work and possible hard blockers.
- You require maintained, security-patched dependencies. The repository is archived — no fixes, no PHP version bumps, no CVE response. Anything you adopt becomes your maintenance burden permanently.
- You need actual verification, not format checking: NIP/REGON status via the official registries (or the EU VIES API for VAT), bank account ownership confirmation, or sanctions/PEP screening. Those are API integrations, not local validators.
- You need non-Polish IBANs or broader EU identifier coverage — this is scoped narrowly.
- Your procurement or security process requires evidence of tests, CI, and an active maintainer. Seven stars with zero dependents means effectively no community scrutiny and no downstream bug discovery.
PM recommendation: do not add as a runtime dependency. Budget roughly one to three engineering days to reimplement the five validators as native Laravel validation rules, using this repository as the specification and as a source of test cases.
How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)
For executives (one paragraph): For our Polish launch we need to validate five local identifiers — personal ID (PESEL), tax ID (NIP), company registry number (REGON), national ID card, and bank account (IBAN). This open-source package contains the correct rules for all five, but it is an abandoned, archived library with essentially no user base, so shipping it in production would mean owning unmaintained code and inheriting a supply-chain risk for something that is fundamentally a few dozen lines of arithmetic. The right move is to treat it as free documentation: our engineers reimplement the checks in-house in a couple of days, keep the tests, and stay fully supported and upgradeable. Cost is trivial; the risk avoided is not.
For engineering: Use this repo as the reference spec, not as a dependency. Extract the weighting/checksum tables and edge cases (REGON 9 vs. 14 digits, PESEL birthdate and gender bits, ID card letter weights, IBAN mod-97), port them into framework-native validation rules, and write tests against known-good and known-bad fixtures. Do not present these as "identity verification" in the product — they are syntactic checks only. Where the business needs real verification, that is a separate API integration against the national registries or VIES.
For compliance and legal: These validators confirm an identifier is well-formed; they do not confirm it belongs to a real person or active company. Any customer-facing claim, KYC policy, or regulatory filing must reflect that distinction, and the decision on whether to add registry lookups should be made explicitly rather than inherited from a form-validation library.