API Terms of Service

You may query the API and display the results inside your own products, applications and marketing surfaces, to your own users and customers. You may store answers alongside the properties they describe, show them to a host, put them in a report you generate, and build features on top of them.

You may do this for as many of your own end users as you like. We do not charge per seat and we do not restrict which of your users may see an answer.

We bill per answer, never per request. A response is billable only when it carries enough proven facts to actually answer the question. If we cannot tell you anything about a jurisdiction, the call still returns whatever we hold, still puts that jurisdiction into research, and costs you nothing.

Every metered response tells you what it was: meta.billable says whether we charged, meta.billing_reason says why not when we did not, and meta.query_level says whether you received a state, city or address answer. Address answers are priced separately and higher, because they resolve a specific parcel. You can reconcile an invoice against your own logs without asking us, and GET /v1/usage shows the same totals broken down by level.

/v1/coverage is never billed on any plan. You should be able to check whether we cover your markets before you pay us anything.

You may not:

• redistribute, resell or sublicense the data as a dataset, feed, file or API to anyone else;
• assemble responses into a database whose purpose is to substitute for querying us;
• use responses to train, fine-tune or evaluate a machine learning model, or to build a product that competes with the HostReady data service;
• systematically retrieve the catalogue, by enumeration or otherwise, for the purpose of reconstructing it;
• strip, alter or obscure the citations attached to a fact.

The line is between using the data in your product and becoming a second source of it. Serving a million of your own hosts is using it. Handing a copy to someone who would otherwise be our customer is not.

We monitor for retrieval patterns consistent with reconstruction. If we see one, we will email you and ask, because the most common cause is a legitimate one-off backfill and we would rather help you structure it than interrupt it.

You may cache answers for up to 24 hours for performance. Caching beyond that is reconstruction by a slower route, and it also puts you at risk: if we withdraw a fact because it turned out not to be supported by its source, a stale copy on your surface is the one your host acts on.

If we notify you that a fact has been withdrawn, stop displaying it within 48 hours.

Where you display our data to your own users, credit it as “Compliance data by HostReady” with a link to the relevant market page. One credit per surface is enough; you do not need to repeat it beside every field.

What we promise. Every regulatory fact we publish is accompanied by a link to the government source it was read from and the sentence it was read from. If a fact has no citation, we do not show it to you at all, and we do not charge you for it. We publish which government each obligation comes from, so you can tell a city rule from a county one.

What we do not promise. We do not promise that every fact is correct. Our extraction and verification process is good, not perfect. Ordinances change, governments republish pages, and a correctly cited fact can still be stale or misread. Coverage varies by jurisdiction and no minimum coverage level is warranted.

The data is provided on an “as is” basis without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. You are responsible for verifying anything you or your users act on.

If you believe a fact is wrong, report it. We will re-check it against its source and either confirm it, correct it, or withdraw it.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, HostReady’s total liability arising out of or relating to these terms is limited to the fees you paid us in the twelve months preceding the claim.

HostReady is not liable for indirect, incidental, consequential, special, exemplary or punitive damages, or for lost profits or lost revenue, including fines, penalties, assessments or enforcement costs levied by any government authority against you or your end users.

That last exclusion is deliberate and we would rather say it plainly than bury it: the foreseeable harm from regulatory data being wrong is a host being fined, and neither the price of this service nor any price we could charge covers that risk across a portfolio. You should treat our answers as a very good starting point and a research tool, not as an indemnity.

Secret keys (hr_live_) are yours to protect and must be used from your servers. Publishable keys (hr_pk_) are for browser use and are valid only from the origins you register; a publishable key with no registered origin is rejected.

Rate limits, monthly answer ceilings and parcel-answer ceilings are set by your plan and published at /docs/api. Reaching a ceiling returns a distinct error naming the next plan, not a generic failure. We may suspend a key that is materially breaching section 3, or that is causing a service problem, and we will tell you why.

Plans run for the term you purchased and renew automatically. We will give at least 60 days’ notice of a price change, which takes effect at your next renewal.

If these terms change materially, we will notify you at least 30 days before the change takes effect. On termination, stop querying the API and delete cached answers within 30 days. Answers already embedded in reports you generated for your own customers before termination may remain in those reports.

Questions about these terms, a correction, or a licence that does not fit what is described here: support@hostready.ai.