Terms of service

These terms are a contract between you and Merieu Private Limited, the operator of worldgovdata (worldgovdata.com and https://api.worldgovdata.com/v1). They apply whenever you create an account, hold an API key, buy credits, or call the API.

You accept them by creating an account. The version you accepted is recorded against your account at signup, and this page always shows the current one. Three documents form part of this agreement by reference: the acceptable use policy, the cancellation and refund policy, and the privacy policy. Where a data processing addendum has been agreed with you, it prevails over these terms for the processing of personal data.

we, us, our

The operator named in clause 01.

you, customer

The person or organisation holding an account, and anyone using it.

Service

The worldgovdata portal, the public metered API, the account area, the documentation, and anything else we make available under those names.

Data

Statistical observations, indicator metadata and country reference records originating with third-party institutions and republished through the Service.

Credit

The prepaid accounting unit the API meters in. One credit covers one observation row. See clause 06 and pricing.

API key

A secret string of the form wgd_live_<id>_<secret> that authenticates requests as yours and spends your credits.

You must be at least 16 years old, or the age of digital consent where you live if that is higher, and legally able to enter a contract. If you are signing up for an organisation you confirm you are authorised to bind it, and “you” then means both you and that organisation.

Give us an email address you actually control — it is how we send verification, receipts, security notices and anything we are legally required to tell you. Keep it current. One person or organisation, one account: opening extra accounts to collect the free credit grant more than once is a breach of clause 05.

You are responsible for everything done through your account, including by your staff, contractors and anything automated you build on it.

A key is shown in full exactly once, at the moment you create it. We store only a hash of the secret half and can never show it to you again — which also means we can never disclose it to anyone else. If you lose it, revoke it and make a new one.

• ·Treat a key like a password: server-side only, never in a public repository, browser bundle, mobile app, notebook you share, or support ticket.
• ·Every request a key makes is billed to your balance and attributed to you. If someone else has your key, they are spending your credits and acting in your name.
• ·Revoke a compromised key immediately in your account. Revocation takes effect at once.
• ·Tell us at queries@worldgovdata.com if you believe a key has leaked. We will help, but we cannot refund credits already spent through a key you disclosed.

You may hold up to ten active keys. We may revoke a key without notice if we have good reason to believe it is compromised or is being used in breach of clause 05.

The acceptable use policy sets out in full what the Service may and may not be used for, and it forms part of these terms. In summary: do not break the law, do not attack or overload the Service, do not evade metering or rate limits, do not share or resell your key, do not redistribute Data that the underlying licence does not permit you to redistribute, and do not present the Service as your own.

Good-faith security research is welcome and is not a breach — see the coordinated disclosure invitation on the contact page before you start.

The API is prepaid. You buy credits in one-off top-ups of your own choosing; row-returning endpoints spend them; metadata endpoints and the whole portal cost nothing. There is no subscription, no auto-renewal, and we do not store your card.

How they behave

• ·Prepaid. We never serve on credit. If a request would take your balance below zero it is refused with 402 insufficient_credits before any data is produced.
• ·Charged on success only. A request that ends in a 4xx or 5xx costs zero credits. Debits happen after a response is produced and its row count is known.
• ·No expiry. Credits do not expire while your account is open. We will not quietly time them out.
• ·Non-transferable. Credits are tied to your account. They cannot be sold, gifted, pooled across accounts, or moved to another person.
• ·Not money. A credit is a licence to consume a measured quantity of the Service. It is not currency, not a deposit, not a stored-value or payment instrument, and it earns no interest. It has no cash value except through the refund route in clause 07.

Every debit and credit is written to an append-only ledger you can read in your account. If you think a charge is wrong, tell us and we will reconcile it against that ledger.

The price of a credit and the credit cost of an endpoint can change. A change never re-prices credits you already hold, and we will publish a cost increase for an existing endpoint at least 30 days before it takes effect.

Prices are shown on the pricing page in the currency stated there and are inclusive of any applicable taxes. The amount you enter is the amount charged and the amount invoiced; nothing is added at checkout. Where GST applies it is contained in that amount rather than added to it, and the invoice states the taxable value and the tax separately; a supply to a customer outside India is a zero-rated export. The credits an amount buys are the same either way. You remain responsible for any withholding, duty or local tax that applies to you and that we are not required to collect.

Payments are taken by a third-party payment processor named on the subprocessors page. We do not see or store your card details. Credits are added to your account as soon as the payment is confirmed — see delivery.

Credits are prepaid and non-refundable. Every account is granted 2,000 credits free at email verification precisely so that you can test the API before paying for it, and credits never expire, so an unused balance is waiting rather than lost. We do not refund unused credits, buy them back for cash, or pay a balance out when an account closes.

That statement does not touch any of the following, and nothing here lets it:

• ·A charge that was duplicated, failed, unauthorised or simply wrong is refunded in full, with no time limit. Correcting our own error is not a refund policy question.
• ·A consumer’s 14-day right of withdrawal for distance contracts in the EU, EEA and UK, on the terms of clause 17 and the refund policy. Where the express consent and acknowledgement that waive it for immediate digital delivery were not obtained, the right stands and we honour it.
• ·Statutory rights where the Service is faulty or is not what we described — including under the Consumer Protection Act 2019 in India, where we are established. Those are not excluded by this clause or by any other.
• ·The exit in clause 15. If we change these terms in a way that materially reduces your rights, you can stop before the change takes effect and your unused balance comes back with you.

The cancellation and refund policy is part of these terms and sets all of this out in full, including how to ask and how long each step takes.

There is no service level agreement at this stage, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The Service is provided on a commercially reasonable, best-effort basis. We do not commit to an uptime percentage, a response-time target, or a support response deadline, and no uptime credit or penalty is payable if the Service is unavailable.

What we do commit to, because we can actually keep it:

• ·We run the Service with reasonable skill and care.
• ·A request that fails costs you nothing, so downtime never drains your balance.
• ·We publish material breaking changes to the API before they land, and we aim to reply to support email within 3 business days (see contact).
• ·If we retire the Service entirely, we will give at least 60 days’ notice and refund the unused credit balance you hold at that date.

Maintenance, provider outages upstream, and rate limiting are all normal parts of operation. Rate limits are documented in the documentation and can be adjusted to protect the Service for everyone.

If we ever offer a paid SLA it will be a separate written agreement. Nothing on this page or in our marketing is one.

All Data belongs to its original providers and is republished here under each source’s own licence — most commonly CC BY. Those licences pass through to you unchanged. Buying credits pays for access to our Service; it does not buy you rights in the Data that the provider did not grant.

• ·Credit both worldgovdata and the underlying provider when you reuse Data, and honour any share-alike, non-commercial or no-derivatives terms that source attaches.
• ·Every provider’s licence is named and linked on the sources page, and the applicable licence travels with the numbers in every export and API response.
• ·Some indicators are display-only: we hold the right to show them, not to let you redistribute them. Those are never served through export or bulk endpoints, and the API returns 403 display_only rather than the rows. Paying does not unlock a licence we do not hold, and no amount of payment ever will.
• ·Where our summary of a provider’s licence and the provider’s own published licence disagree, the provider’s licence governs.

Figures are standardised from third-party statistics and may carry errors, gaps or later revisions from the publisher. Check the original source before relying on a value for a decision. Full detail is in the licensing documentation.

worldgovdata is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or acting on behalf of any institution whose data it republishes.

Provider names, marks and logos belong to their owners and are used only to identify the source of a figure. Nothing in the Service implies that any institution has reviewed, approved or endorsed it, and you must not suggest otherwise in anything you build on top of it.

You keep everything you own. We keep everything we own. Specifically:

• ·The Data belongs to its providers, under the licences in clause 09.
• ·The Service itself — the software, the API design, the standardisation and harmonisation work, the country spine, the indicator taxonomy, the documentation, the site design and the worldgovdata name and wordmark — belongs to us or our licensors. Nothing here transfers ownership of any of it.
• ·Subject to these terms, we grant you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to call the API and to use the responses in your own products, research and publications, provided you honour the provider licences.
• ·You may not copy, decompile, or reverse engineer the Service; remove attribution or licence notices; or use our name or marks in a way that suggests endorsement or affiliation.
• ·Feedback you send us is a gift: we may use it freely, with no obligation and no claim by you, and it stays non-confidential.

To the fullest extent the law allows, the Service and the Data are provided “as is” and “as available”, and we disclaim all warranties, conditions and representations not expressly stated in these terms — including any implied warranty of merchantability, satisfactory quality, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, accuracy, or uninterrupted or error-free operation.

We do not warrant that the Data is accurate, complete or current. It is third-party statistics, harmonised by us and republished; publishers revise their series, and gaps are real. Nothing in the Service is professional, financial, medical, legal or policy advice.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties. Where that is so, this clause applies only as far as that law permits — see clause 17.

Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

Subject to that:

• ·Neither party is liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive loss, or for loss of profit, revenue, goodwill, business, anticipated savings, or data — however caused, and whether or not it was foreseeable.
• ·Our total aggregate liability arising out of or in connection with these terms and the Service is capped at the total amount you actually paid us in the twelve months immediately before the event giving rise to the claim. If you paid us nothing in that period, the cap is zero and your remedy is to stop using the Service.
• ·That single cap applies across all claims taken together, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), statute or otherwise.
• ·We are not liable for any decision you take on the basis of a figure, or for the acts of the institutions whose statistics we republish.

The allocation of risk in this clause is a fundamental part of the bargain: the prices in clause 07 reflect it. Consumer rights that cannot be excluded are unaffected — see clause 17.

If you are using the Service for business purposes, you will defend and indemnify us against third-party claims, and against reasonable legal costs, damages and settlements arising from:

• ·your use of the Service in breach of these terms or the acceptable use policy;
• ·your redistribution or publication of Data in breach of the licence attached to it;
• ·content or applications you build on the Service; or
• ·your infringement of a third party’s rights, or your breach of any law.

We will tell you promptly about any such claim, let you control the defence of it (subject to our approval of any settlement that admits fault or imposes an obligation on us), and cooperate reasonably at your expense. This clause does not apply to consumers.

By you

You can stop at any time. Delete your account from account settings; that is a self-serve action and needs no approval from us. Deleting your account forfeits any unused credit balance unless you ask for a refund first — see the refund policy, and ask before you delete.

By us

We may suspend or limit access — immediately where the risk is immediate, otherwise with notice — if we reasonably believe there is a security incident or a compromised key, a breach of these terms or the acceptable use policy, activity that threatens the Service or other users, non-payment or a payment reversal, or a legal obligation requiring it. We will tell you what happened and what to do about it, unless the law prevents us.

We may terminate for a material breach that is not fixed within 14 days of us asking, or immediately for a breach that cannot be fixed. On termination for your breach, unused credits are forfeited to the extent that is proportionate to the breach; on termination for any other reason, we refund the unused balance.

Clauses 09 to 14, 16 and 17 survive termination, along with anything else that by its nature should.

The Service evolves: indicators are added, endpoints gain parameters, the catalogue and the source list change as providers update their own licences. We may change or withdraw features. Where a change to the API is breaking, we publish it in advance in the changelog.

We may change these terms. When we do, we bump the version stamp at the top of this page and set a new effective date. For a change that materially reduces your rights or increases your obligations, we give at least 30 days’ notice by email to account holders before it takes effect, and continuing to use the Service after that date is acceptance. If you do not accept, stop using the Service before the effective date and ask for a refund of your unused balance — we will give it.

Changes required by law or needed urgently to protect the security of the Service may take effect immediately.

These terms are governed by the laws of India, and the courts of the courts of Mumbai, Maharashtra have exclusive jurisdiction, subject to clause 17.

Talk to us first

Before starting formal proceedings, email queries@worldgovdata.com with the details. Most things we get wrong, we will simply fix. We will respond substantively within 30 days, and neither of us is prevented from seeking urgent injunctive relief in the meantime.

There is no class-action waiver and no compulsory arbitration clause here. If you have a claim, you keep whatever forum the law gives you.

In particular, for consumers resident in the European Union, the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom:

• ·You keep the statutory conformity rights and remedies for digital content and digital services that your national law provides. Clauses 12 and 13 do not reduce them.
• ·You keep the 14-day right of withdrawal for distance contracts, and the refund policy explains exactly how it works here and how the express-consent waiver for immediate digital delivery applies.
• ·The choice of law in clause 16 does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory rules of the country where you live, and you may bring proceedings in the courts of that country.
• ·You may use the European Commission’s online dispute resolution platform, and you may complain to your national consumer protection authority. We would rather you emailed us first.

• ·Entire agreement. These terms and the documents named in clause 01 are the whole agreement between us about the Service.
• ·Severability. If a provision is unenforceable, it is modified to the minimum extent needed to make it enforceable, or struck; the rest stands.
• ·No waiver. Not enforcing something once does not waive it.
• ·Assignment. You may not assign these terms without our written consent. We may assign them to a successor of the business, on notice to you.
• ·No third-party rights. Nobody other than you and us can enforce these terms.
• ·Force majeure. Neither of us is liable for a failure caused by something genuinely outside our reasonable control.
• ·Notices. We write to the email on your account; you write to queries@worldgovdata.com or to the registered address on the contact page.
• ·Language. These terms are written in English. A translation is a convenience; the English governs.