"Six months ago, everyone was talking about MCPs. And I was like, screw MCPs. Every MCP would be better as a CLI."

— Peter Steinberger, Founder of OpenClaw Watch on YouTube (~2:39:00) | Lex Fridman Podcast #491

Taxamo CLI

A production-ready command-line interface for the Taxamo global tax compliance API. Calculate taxes, manage transactions, generate EU VAT reports, and browse country settings directly from your terminal.

Disclaimer: This is an unofficial CLI tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or supported by Taxamo.

Features

• Tax Calculation — Calculate tax amounts for digital goods and services
• Transactions — Create, confirm, list, and get tax transactions
• EU VAT Reports — Generate compliance reports for EU VAT MOSS
• Country Settings — Browse tax settings and rates for any country
• JSON output — All commands support --json for scripting and piping
• Colorized output — Clean, readable terminal output with chalk

Why CLI > MCP

MCP servers are complex, stateful, and require a running server process. A CLI is:

• Simpler — Just a binary you call directly
• Composable — Pipe output to jq, grep, awk, and other tools
• Scriptable — Use in shell scripts, CI/CD pipelines, cron jobs
• Debuggable — See exactly what's happening with --json flag
• AI-friendly — AI agents can call CLIs just as easily as MCPs, with less overhead

Installation

npm install -g @ktmcp-cli/taxamo

Authentication Setup

Taxamo uses API token authentication. You'll need both a private token (for transactions) and optionally a public token (for calculations).

1. Get your tokens

1. Sign up at taxamo.com
2. Go to your account settings and generate API tokens

2. Configure the CLI

taxamo config set --private-token YOUR_PRIVATE_TOKEN
taxamo config set --public-token YOUR_PUBLIC_TOKEN

3. Verify

taxamo countries list

Commands

Configuration

# Set tokens
taxamo config set --private-token <token>
taxamo config set --public-token <token>

# Show current config
taxamo config show

Tax Calculation

# Calculate tax for a German buyer
taxamo tax calculate --amount 100 --buyer-country DE --currency EUR

# Calculate for US buyer (no EU VAT)
taxamo tax calculate --amount 100 --buyer-country US --currency USD

# Different product types
taxamo tax calculate --amount 50 --buyer-country FR --product-type EBOOK

# Get country tax settings
taxamo tax country GB

Transactions

# List transactions
taxamo transactions list

# Filter by date range
taxamo transactions list --from-date 2024-01-01 --to-date 2024-01-31

# Get a specific transaction
taxamo transactions get <key>

# Create a transaction
taxamo transactions create \
  --amount 100 \
  --buyer-country DE \
  --currency EUR \
  --buyer-email customer@example.com

# Confirm a transaction
taxamo transactions confirm <key>

Reports

# Get EU VAT report
taxamo reports eu-vat

# Filter by period
taxamo reports eu-vat --start-month 2024-01 --end-month 2024-03

# Output as JSON
taxamo reports eu-vat --json

Countries

# List all supported countries
taxamo countries list

JSON Output

All commands support --json for machine-readable output:

# Calculate tax and extract amounts
taxamo tax calculate --amount 100 --buyer-country DE --json | jq '.transaction.transaction_lines[0] | {tax_amount, tax_rate, total_amount}'

# List transactions and filter
taxamo transactions list --json | jq '.transactions[] | {key: .key, tax_country: .tax_country_code, total: .total_amount}'

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome at github.com/ktmcp-cli/taxamo.

License

MIT — see LICENSE for details.

Part of the KTMCP CLI project — replacing MCPs with simple, composable CLIs.