Paid Public Data Terms

These terms govern calls to the priced operations of Trusted Master Data, whether paid or served free during a promotional period. For a paid call, the governing version is named in that call's payment challenge, so a caller always knows which terms it agreed to before it pays. For a call served free, no challenge is issued, so the governing version is the one in force at the moment the call is served, as published at /legal/paid-public-data-terms. WHAT IS SOLD Access to reference vocabularies published by third parties, served with provenance, licence, and freshness on every record. Discovery, schemas, pricing, and this document are free and require no account, no API key, and no registration. WHAT YOU PAY Each paid operation carries an immutable price identifier and a fixed amount, published at /v1/pricing. Payment is settled per request under the x402 "exact" scheme. The price is fixed before the call executes. A price identifier never changes meaning. If an amount changes, it is issued as a new identifier with its own effective date; the old identifier is not silently repriced. PROMOTIONAL FREE PERIOD For a limited period the priced operations are served without charge. While the period is open, each priced tool shows the instant it ends as free_until in its availability in tools/list. During the period, no payment challenge is issued and no payment is requested or settled. A call served free is subject to these terms in the same way as a paid call, except that nothing is billed. It is subject to the same rate limits and refusals, and it is audited in the same way, recorded as served free. When the period ends, the priced operations require payment under their published price identifiers. Until payment is available on this deployment, they are unavailable. The free period does not change any price identifier or amount. WHAT IS BILLED, AND WHAT IS NOT Outside the promotional free period, an answer is billed even when it contains no results. A search that matches nothing, or a record that is not in the catalogue, is an answer to the question asked: it costs the same to serve, and the alternative is a free oracle for probing the corpus. A refusal is never billed. A malformed request, a rate limit, a paused service, an unavailable tool, and any failure to execute the operation all terminate before settlement. One consequence is worth stating plainly, because it is not obvious. A record's public-use approval is evaluated at the moment the request is served, not when the payment challenge was issued. If an approval lapses between the challenge and the paid call, the call returns no record and is billed. This is why approvals carry an expiry a caller can read before it pays. WHAT THE DATA IS Third-party public data, served as published, under the licences recorded in the public-data inventory at /eligibility/public-data-inventory. Attribution obligations are set out at /legal/attribution. Where a source states no definition, or no validity interval, the served record says so explicitly rather than inferring one. No warranty is given as to accuracy, completeness, currency, or fitness for any purpose, and no service level is promised. WHAT IS RECORDED ABOUT A CALL Every data-returning request is audited before the data is returned: if the audit record cannot be stored, the data is withheld rather than served unrecorded. The audit record identifies the request, the operation, the price, the payment, a hash of the payer, and a digest of the arguments. It does not contain the payer address itself, and it does not contain the arguments. A source network address is used to apply rate limits. No account is created and no other personal data is collected, because none is required to serve a call. LIMITS Requests are rate limited. A limited request is refused before any charge, with a retry interval. The thresholds are not published, because publishing them would principally serve someone trying to stay just beneath them. REFUNDS, SETTLEMENT AND RETENTION A payment is taken only when the operation executes. A malformed request, a rate limit, a paused service, an unavailable tool, and any failure to execute all terminate before settlement, so there is nothing to refund. Each payment challenge is valid for 60 seconds and binds one operation, with one set of arguments, at one price. A challenge that expires unused settles nothing. Settlement happens at most once per payment. If settlement succeeds but the response does not reach you, retrying with the same payment identifier returns the stored result rather than charging again. If the outcome of a settlement is uncertain, the service answers that it is pending and reconciles before any further charge; it does not guess, and it does not charge twice. Because of this, refunds are not offered as a routine mechanism: the case a refund would ordinarily cover - paying for something that was not delivered - is answered by retrying the same payment identifier. Where a settled payment cannot be reconciled to a delivered result by that route, contact support and it will be resolved individually. Payment records are retained only as long as the accounting and reconciliation obligations of the operating entity require, and are used for nothing else. CHANGES These terms carry a version and an effective date. A changed version is a new version with a new date; the version governing a call is named in that call's payment challenge and does not change retroactively. CONTACT The support and security contacts for this deployment are published in the service discovery document.