Terms of Service

Last updated 31 August 2026 · Effective on first use of the API

These Terms govern access to the Permits API service at permitsapi.com — the REST API, the semantic search endpoint, bulk exports, and the documentation site (together, the “Service”). By requesting an API key, calling the API, or accepting a data export from us, you agree to them. If you are agreeing on behalf of a company, you represent that you are authorised to bind it.

1. What the Service is

We collect building permit records that United States state, county and municipal governments publish on public open-data portals, normalise them into a single schema, and serve them over an HTTP API. Specifically the Service provides:

• a filterable REST endpoint over normalised permit records (GET /api/v1/records);
• a semantic search endpoint that ranks records by vector similarity to a natural-language query;
• CSV export of the same records; and
• an OpenAPI schema and documentation.

We are not a government agency, are not affiliated with or endorsed by any of the jurisdictions whose data we republish, and do not issue, amend or have any authority over permits. Nothing we return is an official record. For an authoritative copy of a permit, go to the issuing jurisdiction.

2. Accounts and API keys

Access requires an API key that we issue to a named account. You are responsible for keeping it secret and for all use made of it, whether or not you authorised that use. Keys are shown once at creation and stored by us only as a keyed hash — we cannot recover a lost key, only issue a replacement.

Tell us promptly at contact@permitsapi.com if you believe a key has been exposed, and we will revoke it. You must be at least 18 and must not be barred from receiving services under United States law or the laws of your jurisdiction.

3. Your licence to the data

The underlying facts in a permit record are public records; we claim no ownership of them. What we licence to you is our compilation, normalisation and enrichment of those records, and the Service itself.

Subject to these Terms and to your account being current, we grant you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable, worldwide licence, for the term of your subscription, to:

• call the Service and store the records it returns;
• use those records internally, including as input to your own analytics, models and products; and
• display and distribute derived output — analyses, aggregates, scores, alerts, and records surfaced inside your own product to your own users.

What this licence does not allow, without a separate written agreement, is redistributing the corpus itself: publishing, reselling, sublicensing or otherwise making available our normalised dataset, in bulk or in any form that lets a recipient substitute it for their own subscription. If your product would let a customer extract the dataset, talk to us first — redistribution terms exist and are usually straightforward.

4. Restrictions

You will not:

• share, sell or sublicense your API key, or let a third party call the Service through your account other than your own end users through your own product;
• circumvent or attempt to circumvent rate limits, quotas or metering, including by distributing calls across multiple accounts to avoid a tier;
• probe, scan or test the vulnerability of the Service, or breach or circumvent any authentication or security measure, without our prior written permission;
• use the Service in a way that degrades it for other customers;
• misrepresent the source or authority of the data — in particular, present it as an official or certified government record; or
• use the Service in violation of any applicable law, including the laws described in section 5.

Security researchers: good-faith vulnerability reports are welcome at the contact address and we will not pursue you for testing that stays within a single account you control and does not touch other customers' data.

5. Using names and addresses

If you use the Service for outreach, lead generation or marketing, you are solely responsible for complying with the law that governs the channel you use. That includes, without limitation:

• the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and its implementing rules, and the National and state Do-Not-Call registries, for calls and SMS — a phone number obtained from a public record is not consent, and statutory damages run per call;
• CAN-SPAM for commercial email;
• state consumer-privacy statutes that give residents rights over their personal information, including the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended; and
• the Fair Credit Reporting Act — see the next paragraph.

The Service is not a consumer reporting agency and the data is not a consumer report under the FCRA. You may not use it, in whole or in part, as a factor in establishing eligibility for credit, insurance, employment, housing, or any other purpose covered by the FCRA. If you need FCRA-regulated data, this is the wrong product.

You will honour any request we forward to you from an individual named in the data, and any suppression list we publish, within a reasonable period.

6. Fees, metering and payment

The Service is billed through Stripe on a metered subscription. You authorise us to charge the payment method on file. Two things are metered, and it is worth being precise about what a “unit” is:

Usage is recorded to our own ledger first and then pushed to Stripe, so a temporary failure to reach Stripe delays a charge rather than losing or duplicating it. Requests that fail with a 4xx or 5xx status, and requests rejected by a rate limit, are not metered.

Fees are stated exclusive of taxes; you are responsible for any sales, use, VAT or similar taxes other than taxes on our income. Charges are billed in arrears for the period in which the usage occurred.

7. Trials and credits

We may issue evaluation keys with a limited request allowance and no payment method. Evaluation access is for assessing the Service and is offered on the same terms as paid access except that it may be withdrawn at any time, carries no availability commitment, and its licence does not extend to production use.

8. Availability and support

We aim for continuous availability but do not offer a contractual uptime commitment or service credits on standard plans. The Service is operated on a single hosted environment; scheduled maintenance, upstream government portal outages and provider incidents will cause interruptions.

Support is by email at contact@permitsapi.com, answered on business days, with no guaranteed response time unless separately agreed in writing.

We may change, add or remove API endpoints and fields. Breaking changes to the /api/v1 surface will be announced by email to account holders at least 30 days in advance where we control the timing. Changes forced on us by an upstream source — a jurisdiction that renames a column, restricts access, or withdraws a dataset — may take effect immediately, because they already have.

9. Accuracy of the data

Concretely, and without limiting section 12:

• Completeness. Our coverage is the set of jurisdictions we have onboarded, not every jurisdiction in the United States. A permit absent from the Service is not evidence that no permit was issued.
• Freshness. We refresh sources on a schedule. A record reflects what the source published when we last read it, not necessarily its current state. Each record carries the timestamp of that read.
• Source errors. Misspelled names, wrong valuations, missing dates and mis-typed addresses exist in the source data and propagate to us.
• Normalisation. Mapping thousands of jurisdiction-specific column names and permit vocabularies into one schema requires classification, and classification is sometimes wrong. Fields such as work_class are our interpretation, not the jurisdiction's own label. The unmodified source values remain available in each record's raw payload so you can check our work.

Tell us about an error at contact@permitsapi.com and we will correct our copy where the source supports it, or route you to the jurisdiction where it does not.

10. Intellectual property

As between you and us, we own the Service, the normalised schema, the compilation and arrangement of records, our classification logic, embeddings, documentation and brand. You own your data, your applications, and any output you derive. Nothing here transfers ownership; each party keeps what it brought.

If you send us feedback or suggestions, you grant us a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free licence to use them without obligation to you. This does not give us rights in your confidential information or your data.

11. Term, suspension and termination

These Terms run from your first use until terminated. You may cancel at any time; cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period and you remain liable for usage already incurred.

We may suspend access immediately, with notice as soon as practicable, if your use threatens the integrity or security of the Service, appears unlawful, or if undisputed fees remain unpaid after notice. We will restore access when the cause is resolved.

We may terminate for material breach that you have not cured within 15 days of written notice, or immediately if cure is not possible. Either party may terminate for convenience on 30 days' notice.

On termination: your licence ends, your keys are revoked, and you must stop calling the Service. Records you have already stored may be retained and used for your internal purposes, but you may not continue to display or distribute them in a product after termination unless we agree otherwise in writing. Sections 9 through 17 survive.

12. Disclaimer of warranties

THE SERVICE AND ALL DATA ARE PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW WE DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, INCLUDING THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, AND ANY WARRANTY ARISING FROM COURSE OF DEALING OR USAGE OF TRADE.

WITHOUT LIMITING THE FOREGOING, WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT THE DATA IS ACCURATE, COMPLETE, CURRENT OR FIT FOR ANY DECISION YOU MAKE, OR THAT THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED OR ERROR-FREE. Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of implied warranties, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

13. Limitation of liability

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, NEITHER PARTY WILL BE LIABLE FOR INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR LOST PROFITS, REVENUE, GOODWILL OR DATA, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY.

OUR TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THESE TERMS OR THE SERVICE WILL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF (a) THE FEES YOU PAID US IN THE THREE (3) MONTHS IMMEDIATELY PRECEDING THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM, OR (b) ONE HUNDRED US DOLLARS (US$100).

These limits do not apply to your payment obligations, to either party's indemnity obligations, or to liability that cannot be limited by law.

14. Indemnification

You will defend, indemnify and hold us harmless from any third-party claim, and any resulting loss, liability, damage, cost and reasonable legal fees, arising out of (a) your use of the Service or the data, including any outreach, marketing or eligibility decision you make with it; (b) your breach of these Terms, particularly section 5; or (c) your product or content.

We will notify you of the claim, give you control of the defence (except that you may not settle in a way that admits fault on our part or imposes an obligation on us without our consent), and cooperate at your expense.

15. Governing law and disputes

Before filing anything, each party will give the other written notice of the dispute at the contact address and try in good faith to resolve it for 30 days. This does not prevent either party from seeking injunctive relief for misuse of intellectual property or confidential information.

16. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms. For material changes we will email account holders and update the date at the top at least 30 days before they take effect. Continuing to use the Service after that date is acceptance. If you do not accept, cancel before the effective date; that is your remedy.

Non-material changes — typographical fixes, clarifications, updates to the subprocessor list in the Privacy Policy — take effect when posted.

17. General

• Entire agreement. These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us on this subject and supersede prior discussions. Terms on your purchase order do not apply.
• Severability. If a provision is unenforceable, it is limited to the minimum extent necessary and the rest stands.
• No waiver. Not enforcing a provision once does not waive it.
• Assignment. Neither party may assign without the other's consent, except to a successor in a merger or sale of substantially all assets, on notice.
• Force majeure. Neither party is liable for delay caused by events beyond its reasonable control, excluding payment obligations.
• Independent contractors. Nothing here creates a partnership, agency or employment relationship.
• Notices. To you, by email to your account address; to us, by email to the contact address below.

18. Contact

Questions about these Terms, redistribution licences, or a data correction: contact@permitsapi.com.

See also the Privacy Policy, which covers what we do with your information and with the personal information contained in permit records.