About vdaDocs
We never file for you. We just make sure you walk in with the right papers.
You probably arrived here to check us: governments warn applicants about sites that look like this one, and they are right to. So this page answers the three questions a suspicious reader brings, in order.
vdaDocs is not a visa agency, a law firm, or a government service. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of any government or consulate. We do not file applications, do not take a fee for filing, and cannot influence a decision. Every requirement here cites the official page it was read from. Always check that page, because it is the one that counts. Nothing here is legal or immigration advice.
Are you the government?
No, and nothing here pretends otherwise. No embassy, no emblem, no flag, on this page most of all. What we work on is the applicant’s own desk: working out what the pile has to contain, before the fee is spent, is the whole job.
What do you get out of it?
No service fee, no upsell, and no version of this where we quietly become the thing you are paying. The government’s fee is the government’s; we do not add to it, because we do not take one.
A Germany short-stay application
A $100 service fee on top of the $105 government fee, plus $26 for the appointment.
Atlys’s own Germany pageAn Australian e-Visitor
Free from the Australian government. Sold through an airline widget at £17.
Travel Gossip, June 2026SMS updates on your own application
Rs 236 at the visa centre. Rs 2,360 if you want the form filled in.
BLS Spain India, additional servicesWhy should I believe your list?
The short version: we read the government’s own page, we write down where each requirement came from, and we say so when we could not read something.
Read from the source, not from other visa sites
Every route is written against the pages the deciding authority publishes: the ministry, the mission that serves India, the form’s own instructions. Aggregators are not sources: the largest Schengen content sites link no official page at all, and a requirement copied from one of them cannot be checked by anybody.
Each requirement carries the page it came from
99.3% of the 27,108 documents in the catalogue name the government page they were read from, across 4,791 named sources. That citation is what makes the list arguable: when we say the consulate wants six months of statements, you can open the page that says so and disagree with us. The largest Schengen content sites link none: one of them carries no outbound link to any official source on its Germany page, and does not link the mission or the visa centre you actually have to deal with.
It is rebuilt, not patched
Requirements are authored against their sources and the whole catalogue is regenerated from them, so a correction lands once and reaches every route that shares the filing. Several routes share one form (every United States route files the DS-160), and a fix typed into one route and not the others is how a catalogue rots quietly.
What we could not read is missing, not guessed
Canada publishes its fees and processing times in a way our reader cannot see, so the Canadian data carries none rather than a number we inferred. Two of its checklists are PDFs behind a host that refuses automated requests, so nothing rests on them. Where two government pages contradict each other, we record the conflict instead of picking a winner.
Where it stops
- Nobody who has actually made one of these applications has read the catalogue back to us yet. It is gathered from official pages and checked against them, and that is a different thing from being tested by someone who has stood at the counter.
- Figures that expire (fees, salary floors, income thresholds) are re-checked each January, and the United States Visa Bulletin every month. A figure is only ever as fresh as the page it was read from, which is why the page is cited beside it.
- Translations into the other languages are machine-assisted and unreviewed by native speakers. The app says so on the language you pick, and so do we.
The official page is right. Getting at it is the problem.
We do not replace the government’s own guidance and we would not want to: it is the only thing that counts, and every requirement here links to it. What we replace is the part where it lives across five portals, three visa centres and a PDF from 2019, and where the site you finally reach fails on submit.
The caveat
Requirements change without notice, and the authority deciding your application is the only one whose word is final. Always open the page we cite.
Start with the route you are actually filing
Two questions (where, and why) and the list is on screen. Nothing is uploaded and no application is started.