If We're Not Up, The Checkout Breaks
Kintsugi puts sales tax compliance on autopilot for 7,300 companies selling into 110 countries, and its tax engine sits inside other companies' checkouts. The answer has to arrive before the shopper finishes paying. "Typically, a customer's expectation is that we are returning the sales tax estimate on the invoice within 100 milliseconds." The cost of missing is not abstract: "For every minute that our sales tax API, if it ever goes down, our customers are not able to collect roughly $4 million in sales tax that they should be collecting.".