A Free, Fresh, Privacy-Respecting Business Registry: How nimistu Is Built

A public business registry should be fast, accurate, free, and respectful of people's privacy. Too often it is the opposite: Ad-choked, slow, out of date, behind a paywall, and selling your data on the side. Nimistu is deliberately built the other way. Here is how it differs, with a look at the technical architecture for those curious about how it works under the hood.

Every Claim Carries Its Source

Nimistu aggregates data from more than 70 official sources. Every field on the page carries its source and the date it was last updated, so you can always see where a number comes from and how fresh it is. That is the difference between a registry you can trust and just some website: We do not ask to be trusted blindly, we show you where each fact comes from. You can see which sources these are on our sources page, and how the data reaches a single profile is explained in where Estonian company data comes from.

Fresh, Not Stale

Data refreshes every day, and the processing is self-healing: If a source is faulty, the old data is not wiped, and the system retries. New registrations land within minutes, not months. Plenty of other services show you snapshots from years ago. Our goal is for what you see to match today's reality.

How It Works Under the Hood

This is where it gets technical. Nimistu's performance is not an accident; it comes from a number of deliberate architectural choices.

Data is served from memory. The entire dataset lives in system memory. This means queries are read from memory at memory speed rather than from disk: A typical page request never touches storage at all. The data is, of course, persisted on mirrored drives, but serving happens from memory. This is the main reason even massive pages open almost instantly.

Processors chosen for single-core speed. How fast a page loads depends mostly on the sequential handling of a single request, not on how many cores run in parallel. So we optimize for single-core performance rather than core count, the opposite of how a typical cloud server is chosen.

Error-correcting hardware. Memory is always error-correcting (ECC), catching silent bit-flips before they can corrupt data. Drives are mirrored, so a single disk failure does not take the service down.

Edge caching and a light front end. Where possible, content is loaded from cache, we self-host our fonts, and we keep the page light and script-lean. Fewer scripts mean faster loading and fewer trackers. The result is a fast page, not a bouncing ad service.

Built to be reliable. Backups run every day. The system is monitored around the clock, and under heavy load it slows down individual requests rather than falling over entirely.

We Run Everything Ourselves in the EU

Our systems do not sit in someone else's cloud, and we do not hand off operations. We host our servers in the European Union and manage every layer ourselves, from hardware and caching to security mechanisms. That means we know exactly where the data lives, how it is kept, and who can reach it. The data does not leave the European Union.

All of this would be hard to do without our supporters. Cloudflare, GitHub, and UptimeRobot donate services to nimistu that would otherwise cost more than €2,200 a year.

Privacy Isn’t an Afterthought

We handle personal data under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the guidance of the Estonian Data Protection Inspectorate (AKI), and we designed for it from day one. We do not display personal identification codes publicly. We apply a tiered retention policy: Data that is no longer relevant is removed from public view once the legally permitted period passes, and we do not index the profiles of non-profit and apartment-association members for search engines. We genuinely honor the rights to erasure and objection. Public information stays public, but we do not build a sellable profile of anyone. How we handle specific requests is set out in our privacy policy.

Made for Everyone

Nimistu is free and ad-free: No paywall, no pop-ups, no dark patterns. The site is in three languages (Estonian, English, Russian), with a clean structure, good contrast, and full keyboard navigation. The data is machine-readable too: We offer open interfaces and machine-friendly formats, because public information should be available to everyone.

In Closing

Just like Tallinn, nimistu is never quite finished. We work continuously to bring visitors fresher data and a better experience. Nimistu is built the way a public registry should be: Fast, accurate, and open. Every choice, from serving in memory to error-correcting hardware, serves the same goal. And we intend to keep it that way. To see how to put this data to use in practice, read our guide on how to check an Estonian company.