A country dashboard
40 indicators × 1 country × 30 years
- Rows
- 1,200
- Credits
- 1,200
- Smallest top-up
- Free grant covers it
Inside the free grant on the first build, and cheap to keep current: refreshed monthly for a year it is still one minimum top-up.
Pricing
Pricing
The portal is free and always will be. The API is prepaid at a flat rate: one credit is one row of data, you buy credits in whatever amount you like, and you keep whatever you do not use. Metadata endpoints — the catalogue, indicators, topics, freshness, coverage — never cost anything, so you can find out exactly what you want before you buy any of it.
Prices are shown in Indian rupeesUnited States dollars, and that is the currency you are charged in — it follows where you are rather than what you pick, and the credits you get are the same number either way. If it is wrong for you, the country on your account settings governs it from then on, for both the price and the tax.
The rate
₹100100,000rows of data
One credit is one row, so the credits you buy and the rows you can fetch are the same number. The rate is flat: no tiers, no volume discount and nothing to choose between — ₹100 buys the same 100,000 rows on your first purchase and your fiftieth.
Minimum
₹100
100,000 rows
Step
₹100
Any whole multiple — you enter the amount
Maximum
₹500,000
Larger than that, we invoice it
Tax
Included in the price
18% is extracted from the amount you enter, never added to it — the figure you type is the figure charged and the figure on the invoice.
| You pay | You get |
|---|---|
| ₹100 | 100,000 rows |
| ₹500 | 500,000 rows |
| ₹1,000 | 1,000,000 rows |
| ₹10,000 | 10,000,000 rows |
| ₹45,500 | 45,500,000 rows — covers the whole database |
The database holds 45,487,514 rows. That last line is not an offer, it is the ceiling: ₹45,500 would fetch every observation we have, once, so no bill for this API can be larger than that. Most work needs a few thousand rows and costs ₹100.
Create an account
Credits never expire, there is no subscription and no card is stored — every purchase is a one-off.
The rate
$1100,000rows of data
One credit is one row, so the credits you buy and the rows you can fetch are the same number. The rate is flat: no tiers, no volume discount and nothing to choose between — $1 buys the same 100,000 rows on your first purchase and your fiftieth.
Minimum
$1
100,000 rows
Step
$1
Any whole multiple — you enter the amount
Maximum
$5,000
Larger than that, we invoice it
Tax
Included in the price
18% is extracted from the amount you enter, never added to it — the figure you type is the figure charged and the figure on the invoice.
| You pay | You get |
|---|---|
| $1 | 100,000 rows |
| $5 | 500,000 rows |
| $10 | 1,000,000 rows |
| $100 | 10,000,000 rows |
| $455 | 45,500,000 rows — covers the whole database |
The database holds 45,487,514 rows. That last line is not an offer, it is the ceiling: $455 would fetch every observation we have, once, so no bill for this API can be larger than that. Most work needs a few thousand rows and costs $1.
Create an account
Credits never expire, there is no subscription and no card is stored — every purchase is a one-off.
Price includes GST. 18% is extracted from the amount you enter, never added to it — the figure you type is the figure charged and the figure on the invoice. Sales outside India are zero-rated exports under our LUT and are charged exactly the amount shown. Prices are stated and charged in INRUSD; your bank may apply its own conversion or cross-border fee, which we never see.
Of record
The rate, in full
The authoritative statement of what credits cost, in Indian rupees (INR)United States dollars (USD), with the currency named so no symbol has to be guessed at.
- Rate
- ₹100 INR = 100,000 credits$1 USD = 100,000 credits
- Credit unit
- 1 credit = 1 observation row — one country, one indicator, one year.
- Volume discount
- None. The rate is flat at every size, so there is no threshold to reach and nothing to negotiate against.
- Minimum
- ₹100 INR$1 USD
- Increment
- ₹100 INR$1 USD
- Maximum
- ₹500,000 INR$5,000 USD — a fat-finger guard, not a policy. Larger purchases are invoiced by hand.
- Tax
- Price includes GST. 18% is extracted from the amount you enter, never added to it — the figure you type is the figure charged and the figure on the invoice.
- Expiry
- None. Credits stay until you spend them or ask for them back.
The unit
What a credit buys
One credit is one observation row: one country, one indicator, one year. There is no conversion to do and no rounding to reason about — the number of rows a request returns is the number of credits it costs.
- Cost is the row count. A request returning 1 row costs 1 credit; 100 rows costs 100; 4,300 rows costs 4,300. The formula is max(1, rows), applied once per request.
- You are billed for what arrives, not for what you asked for. A query that matches nothing still costs the minimum 1 credit, because we ran it.
- Failures are free. Any 4xx or 5xx costs zero.
- Nothing is charged twice. Cache what you fetch. Re-fetching a series you already have is the most common way people waste credits, and we would rather tell you that here than sell you the second copy.
| Endpoint | Cost | What it returns |
|---|---|---|
| GET /v1/countries | Free | The full 218-country spine: names, codes, region and income group. |
| GET /v1/indicators | Free | The whole indicator catalogue, searchable and filterable. |
| GET /v1/indicators/{id} | Free | One indicator's metadata: unit, provider, licence, coverage, direction. |
| GET /v1/topics | Free | The 13-topic taxonomy. |
| GET /v1/meta/* | Free | Freshness and coverage — how current each provider is, and what we hold. |
| GET /v1/usage | Free | Your own balance and recent usage. |
| GET /v1/ping | Free | Key liveness: the key id, its scopes and your balance. |
| GET /v1/countries/{iso3} | 1 credit | One country's profile with its observation values. |
| GET /v1/rankings/{indicator} | 1 credit | Every country ranked on one indicator. |
| GET /v1/data | 1 per row | Observations as JSON or CSV. Cost is max(1, rows) — the only endpoint that scales. |
Seven of the ten endpoints are free, and they are the ones you need to work out what to ask for. Full detail in the credits documentation.
In practice
What that costs in real work
Three jobs people actually run, priced end to end in INRUSD.
A cross-country study
12 indicators × 190 countries × 25 years
- Rows
- 57,000
- Credits
- 57,000
- Smallest top-up
- ₹100 INR$1 USD
One full extraction. Cache it and the analysis itself costs nothing more.
A nightly pipeline
5 indicators × 190 countries × 60 years, every night for a year
- Rows
- 20,805,000
- Credits
- 20,805,000
- Smallest top-up
- ₹20,900 INR$209 USD
The case for fetching only what changed — see the pagination guide. Re-downloading a series you already hold is the most expensive habit on this list.
Figures assume one row per country-indicator-year and no gaps, so they are the ceiling rather than the expectation — real coverage is sparser and real cost is lower. “Smallest top-up” is the least you could buy to cover the job, rounded up to the ₹100$1 step; anything left over stays on your balance. The whole database is 45,487,514 rows, or ₹45,500 INR$455 USD, and no job can cost more than that.
No account required
What is free
Not a trial, not a teaser, and not limited to a fortnight. These things are free because charging for them would be the wrong product.
- The entire portal. Every country page, every ranking, every chart, the comparison tools, the index builder, the CSV and JSON downloads on every ranking page. No account, no key, no limit. This is the whole product for most people.
- Every metadata endpoint on the API. The country spine, the indicator catalogue, individual indicator metadata, the topic taxonomy, freshness and coverage. Browsing the catalogue to find out what to buy must not itself cost money.
- Anonymous access to those free endpoints. No key needed at all, rate-limited by address. The catalogue stays publicly crawlable on purpose.
- 2,000 credits on verification — 2,000 observation rows, granted once when you verify your email address. Enough to write your integration against real responses and see the metering work; a real extraction needs a top-up.
- The documentation and the OpenAPI spec. Obviously.
Which one
Portal or API?
Most people never need a key. The API is for the cases where a browser is the wrong instrument.
| Feature | Portal — free | API — metered |
|---|---|---|
| Account needed | No | Yes — a key, and credits for row-returning calls |
| Browsing and charts | Every country, indicator, ranking and comparison tool | Not its job — build your own |
| Exports | CSV and JSON on every ranking page, by hand | CSV and JSON on demand, at any shape |
| Automation | None. It is a website. | Scheduled jobs, pipelines, bulk extraction |
| Query shape | What the page offers | Any combination of countries, indicators and years |
| Cost | Free, permanently | Free metadata; 1 credit per row of data |
If you are reading numbers, use the portal. If you are moving numbers into something else, use the API. The quickstart takes about a minute end to end.
Questions
Frequently asked
- What exactly is a credit?
- A prepaid accounting unit, and it is one observation row — one country, one indicator, one year. It is not currency, it does not expire, and it cannot be transferred between accounts. The precise position is in clause 06 of the terms.
- Is the price inclusive of tax?
- Yes. Price includes GST. 18% is extracted from the amount you enter, never added to it — the figure you type is the figure charged and the figure on the invoice. A price that grows between the input field and the payment sheet is the single most common reason a checkout is abandoned, so ours does not.
- Are there packs, tiers or a volume discount?
- No, and there used to be. The rate is flat: ₹100 buys 100,000 rows whether it is your first purchase or your fiftieth.$1 buys 100,000 rows whether it is your first purchase or your fiftieth. You enter an amount rather than choosing a product, which means there is no bundle to be nudged towards and nothing to over-buy.
- Do credits expire?
- No. They stay in your account until you spend them or ask for them back. We will not quietly time them out, and there is no monthly reset to lose them to.
- Is there a subscription?
- No. Every purchase is a one-off, nothing auto-renews, and no card is stored. That is also what makes the refund story simple.
- What happens if I run out mid-job?
- The request is refused up front with 402 insufficient_credits, carrying the number of credits required and your balance, before any data is produced. We never serve on credit and never let a balance go negative, so a runaway loop cannot leave you owing money.
- Do failed requests cost anything?
- No. Anything that ends 4xx or 5xx costs zero credits. Credits are debited after a successful response exists and its row count is known, in the same transaction that records the usage.
- Can I see what I spent it on?
- Every debit and credit is an entry in an append-only ledger, readable on your usage page with a daily chart and a per-endpoint breakdown. Every metered response also carries X-Credits-Charged and X-Credits-Remaining headers.
- Can I get a refund?
- Unused credits, in full, within 14 days of purchase — no reason required. After that and up to 12 months, on request. Failed and duplicate charges are always returned. The whole policy, including timelines, is on the cancellation and refund page.
- Do you offer academic or non-profit pricing?
- There is no volume discount to ask for — the rate is the rate — but yes, and we would rather you asked than gave up. Email queries@worldgovdata.com with what you are doing. The catalogue is public statistics; we are not trying to make research expensive.
- Is an invoice available?
- Every purchase produces a receipt number immediately and a printable invoice in account billing. Ask us to reissue it with a company name, address or tax registration number and we will.
- Can I buy access to a licence you do not hold?
- No, and no amount of money changes it. Indicators marked display_only can be shown on the site but not redistributed, because that is the right the publisher granted us. Paying does not unlock a licence we do not have. See licensing.
In writing
The commercial promises, in one place
Each of these is written into a policy you can hold us to, not just into marketing copy.
- Credits never expire, and a price change never re-prices credits you already hold — terms, clause 06.
- The price you enter is the price you pay. Tax is included in it, never added to it at the payment screen.
- Unused credits refunded in full within 14 days, for any reason — refund policy.
- Delivery within seconds, and a full refund if we cannot deliver — delivery.
- No subscription, no auto-renewal, no stored card. Nothing is ever charged that you did not start.
- A cost increase on an existing endpoint is published at least 30 days ahead, and if it makes your balance materially less useful you can have the money back.
- If we ever retire the service, 60 days’ notice and every unused credit refunded — terms, clause 08.
- And the one that is not a promise but a limit: there is no service level agreement at this stage. The service is best-effort, no uptime is guaranteed, and we say so on the terms page rather than hiding it here.