2Mig compared with applying on your own

What makes doing it yourself hard

Not the form. The form is tedious but finite. The difficulty is elsewhere, and it is worth naming precisely.

• The requirements are not in one place

  A destination's conditions are spread across a portal, a consular page, a regulation and, often, a practice that is written down nowhere. Finding them is the work; knowing you found all of them is impossible.

• Everything has to agree with everything else

  Passport, dates, booking, insurance, bank statement, employment letter, the form itself — a single inconsistency between any two of them is a reason to come back later. You are doing consistency work across separate documents, by eye.

• Nothing tells you a requirement does not apply to you

  Guidance is written for everyone, so it lists everything. Working out which items are not required in your situation is guesswork, and the safe response — bringing all of it — means gathering documents nobody asked you for.

• Timing cuts both ways

  Apply too late and the decision does not arrive before the trip. Apply too early and the permission can expire before you travel. The window is arithmetic on a published processing time, and it is easy to get wrong in either direction.

None of this makes applying yourself a mistake. Plenty of people do it once, carefully, and it works. But the reason it works is that they happened to read the right page — and you cannot tell in advance whether you did.

What we add to it

1. The requirements are broken into checks, each with its source

   Instead of a page you read, a list you can act on: which requirement, from which norm, verified on which date, at which rule version. Where we have not verified something against a primary source, it says so instead of implying it is confirmed.

   RuleSource on every rule; RequiredDocument.source is null when unverified

2. Consistency is checked by code, not by your eye

   A stay longer than the permission allows is a comparison between two of your own dates, and a rule that can fail. That specific check used to be text on a screen — a limit communicated by being written down, which means it relied on someone reading it. It is now a predicate that returns violated.

   the daysBetweenLte predicate; the Sri Lanka limit is 30 days — 31 fails, 30 passes (inclusive)

3. A document you do not need is not on your list

   Necessity is a condition evaluated against your profile. A student is not asked for an employment certificate — it is not shown at all, rather than marked optional. When the condition cannot be settled yet, the document says “may be needed” and names the field that would settle it.

   requiredWhen as a predicate, three states including UNDETERMINED

4. Questions come in the order that removes the most work

   Not a form top to bottom. The field that decides whether a whole document is needed is asked before the field that only fills a box — so one answer can shorten the list rather than just advance a counter.

   corridors/next-question.ts, priority by what an answer unlocks

5. The window is computed, and shows its input

   “Apply between the 20th and the 27th”, derived by the server from the destination's published processing time, with that figure shown. If the figure is not confirmed by a primary source, the panel says so rather than letting you plan a trip around an unverified number.

   corridors/submission-window.ts

6. “Cannot check this” is a visible answer

   Not a yes or no. Alongside satisfied and violated: not-enough-information, with the missing fields named — plus does-not-apply and not-yet-reviewed. Doing it yourself, all three of those are invisible; each feels identical to being fine.

   FindingStatus: SATISFIED / VIOLATED / NOT_APPLICABLE / UNKNOWN / NOT_PUBLISHED; an empty field never passes

7. Your name is taken from the document, never derived

   The ICAO transliteration table has no Kazakh Ә, Қ, Ң, Ө, Ұ, Ү, and Kazakhstan's own system is not one-to-one — several legitimate Latin spellings can belong to one person. We therefore never generate or “fix” your name: the machine-readable line is shown to you and you confirm it. Applying yourself, this is the field you are most likely to normalise by guessing.

   no corridor extracts a name; enforced by three separate tests

8. A rule can tell you a step does not apply to you

   For Schengen, biometrics already recorded within the last 59 months mean no personal appearance is required. That is a condition on your own history, not a fact about everyone — and it is the kind of thing general guidance cannot say, because guidance is written for all readers and therefore lists every step.

   Visa Code Art. 13(3); the 59-month field exists in the profile schema

Side by side

Rows where our cell is unfilled are marked, with the reason in the cell. On several of these, applying yourself is currently the better option, and the table says so.

Five of thirteen rows are unfilled on our side, and on the last one applying yourself is the only thing that works today. We would rather tell you that than let the table imply otherwise.

What we will not take over

Some of the work stays yours by design, not because we have not got to it.

• Signing the government form. For some destinations that is explicitly forbidden; for the rest it is still yours to do.
• Holding your password for a government or operator portal.
• Paying the government fee through us. You pay the state directly.
• Confirming a value the machine read without you looking at it. A read value is a proposal until you confirm it.
• Quoting you a chance of approval. We do not calculate one.
• Telling you a requirement is confirmed when we have not checked it against a primary source.