The questions a tool of this kind regularly attracts, answered in a way that also names what it does not do.
What is this tool for?
For a first assessment of which of the nine regimes covered may reach a company under their general size and scope thresholds, and from when. That is the step that usually comes first in practice and is often handled with several afternoons of web research. The result does not replace an examination of the individual case, but it says which direction that examination should take and how urgent it is.
Is this legal advice?
No. The check compares entered figures and characteristics with abstractly worded statutory criteria and reports the outcome of that comparison. It does not apply the law to the circumstances of a particular company, does not weigh questions of interpretation and makes no recommendation. Under German law this means it is not a legal service within the meaning of section 2(1) of the Legal Services Act. The details are set out in the Haftungsausschluss, which is held in German.
How reliable is the result?
The thresholds and dates are reliable, because they rest on named, publicly available sources and are secured by a test suite that checks each threshold at its boundary. What is not reliable is the transfer to a concrete case as soon as one of the constellations the model deliberately omits is present: group attribution, special rules for financial and insurance undertakings, sector-specific deviations, transitional provisions. The full list is under limits of the model.
What happens to the figures I enter?
Nothing leaves the device. The calculation runs entirely in the browser, there is no endpoint values could be sent to, and nothing is logged. The record is produced in the browser as well. Anyone who copies the link to a result does carry the key figures in the address bar, so that link deserves the same care as the figures themselves. The details are in the Datenschutzerklärung, which is held in German.
What is the record for?
So that a result outlives the browser tab. The record holds the profile used, the result for each regime, the criteria checked with the value applied to each, the concrete duties, the sources with their check dates, and the version number of the rule set together with the legal cut-off date. It also carries a reference number derived from the profile, so the same profile always produces the same number. Anyone wanting to process the result further downloads the JSON version instead.
How current is the information?
The legal cut-off date appears in the footer of every page and on every record. It marks the day the figures were last checked against their sources. The four regimes currently in motion are checked monthly, the rest quarterly or twice a year. Every change is dated and evidenced in the change log.
Why these nine regimes?
Because they are the regimes currently reaching the largest number of companies in Germany for the first time, and the ones whose thresholds have moved most. CBAM, the Digital Services Act and the Data Act are on the list but not yet covered; what is planned is stated openly in the change log.
Is there artificial intelligence behind this?
No, and that is deliberate. The calculation is a condition test over a published data file. The same profile always gives the same result, every row can be traced back to the criterion and the value that produced it, and there is nothing that cannot be explained after the fact. With commercial tools, exactly that is a separate criterion in procurement.
May I reuse the rule set?
Reading, checking and quoting are expressly welcome; the data file, the schema, the change log and the calculation logic are all freely accessible. Taking it into your own product requires asking first, and for research and teaching permission is normally granted. The details are in the Nutzungsbedingungen, which are held in German.
Why are the legal documents in German?
Because the provider is established in Germany and the duties they implement, in particular the provider identification under section 5 of the German Digital Services Act, are German-law obligations whose authoritative version is German. A translation would have no legal effect and could create a false impression of precision. The documents are linked in the footer and apply to the English version of this site in the same way.
I have found an error.
Notes on incorrect, outdated or misleading information go to nino.hein@carteblanche-regulatory.eu. Well-founded corrections are carried into the rule set and recorded in the change log with a date and a source. The same applies to reports of accessibility barriers.
Who is behind this?
CarteBlanche is a product of Nuuk UG (haftungsbeschränkt) in Osnabrück, Germany. The full provider details are in the Impressum. The offering is free of charge; there are no accounts, no advertising and no paid tier.
13 October 2026To the check