Free
$0
2,000 credits
≈ 200,000 rows
Granted once when you verify your email. Metadata endpoints stay free forever, with or without a balance.
Pricing
Pricing
The portal is free and always will be. The API is prepaid: buy credits once, spend them when you fetch rows, and 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 USD. The currency you are charged in is the one you select here.
Starter
$6
25,000 credits
≈ 2.5M rows · $0.24 per 1,000
Payments open soon
Growth
$24
120,000 credits
≈ 12M rows · $0.2 per 1,000
Payments open soon
Scale
$89
500,000 credits
≈ 50M rows · $0.18 per 1,000 · best rate
Payments open soon
One credit covers about 100 observation rows. Credits never expire, there is no subscription and no card is stored — every purchase is a one-off. Metadata endpoints (the catalogue, indicators, topics, freshness and coverage) are free and are never metered.
All prices are exclusive of any applicable taxes, which are added at checkout where we are required to charge them. Prices are stated in USD and you are charged in USD; your bank may apply its own conversion or cross-border fee, which we never see.
Of record
Price list — USD
The authoritative statement of what each pack costs, in United States dollars (USD), with the currency named in full so no symbol has to be guessed at.
| Pack | Price | Credits | Rows (approx.) | Per 1,000 credits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free grant | No charge | 2,000 | 200,000 | — |
| Starter | $6 USD | 25,000 | 2,500,000 | $0.24 USD |
| Growth | $24 USD | 120,000 | 12,000,000 | $0.20 USD |
| Scale | $89 USD | 500,000 | 50,000,000 | $0.18 USD |
The unit
What a credit buys
One credit covers up to 100 observation rows. An observation row is one value: one country, one indicator, one year. Everything else on the API is free.
- Cost is rounded up, per request. A request returning 1 row costs 1 credit; 100 rows costs 1; 101 rows costs 2; 4,300 rows costs 43. The formula is max(1, ceil(rows ÷ 100)), 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 100 rows | Observations as JSON or CSV. Cost is max(1, ceil(rows ÷ 100)) — 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 USD.
A country dashboard
40 indicators × 1 country × 30 years
- Rows
- 1,200
- Credits
- 12
- At Starter rate
- Free grant covers it
Refreshed monthly, that is a year of operation inside the free grant.
A cross-country study
12 indicators × 190 countries × 25 years
- Rows
- 57,000
- Credits
- 570
- At Starter rate
- Free grant covers it
One full extraction. Cache it and the analysis costs nothing more.
A nightly pipeline
5 indicators × 190 countries × 60 years, every night for a year
- Rows
- 20,805,000
- Credits
- 208,050
- At Starter rate
- $50 USD
The case for fetching only what changed — see the pagination guide.
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. The Scale pack works out at $0.18 USD per 1,000 credits, which is 100,000 rows.
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 — about 200,000 observation rows, granted once when you verify your email address. Enough to build and ship a real integration before spending anything.
- 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 100 rows 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. One credit covers up to 100 observation rows returned by a billable endpoint. 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.
- 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, non-profit or volume pricing?
- Yes, and we would rather you asked than gave up. Email connect@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.
- 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.