Terms of service

The short version

You may build more or less anything on this API, including commercial products. The capacity figures are indicative — they are what operators publish, not a connection offer. The publications behind them belong to the operators and carry their own terms, which travel with every figure as its rights status. You may not resell the dataset itself unless your plan includes redistribution rights. There is no uptime guarantee yet. If you stop paying, your account moves to the Free plan and your keys keep working within its limits.

The rest of this page is the same thing said carefully. It is not a substitute for an agreement negotiated for a large deployment — if you need one of those, write to hello@gridcapacityapi.com.

1. What this service is

GridCapacity API collects grid hosting-capacity figures that transmission and distribution system operators have published, reconciles them into one stable data model, records where each figure came from, and provides programmatic access to that model. It is an independent product. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by any transmission or distribution system operator, and it does not speak for any of them.

2. What a capacity figure means

Hosting-capacity figures are indicative and reflect what operators publish. They are not a connection offer; only the operator can confirm capacity for a specific request.

Operators compute, publish and revise these figures on their own schedules and by their own methods. A figure here is the figure as it was published when we read it, and every record says when that was and where. Do not rely on it for an investment, a connection application or any decision with a consequence without confirming it with the operator concerned.

3. Accounts and keys

You need an account to hold an API key, and you must give a real email address, because it is how you will be told about anything that affects your integration. One account per person or organisation.

Your API keys are yours to look after. A key is shown once, at creation, and only its hash is stored — so it cannot be recovered, only replaced. Traffic authenticated with your key is treated as yours. If a key leaks, revoke it in the dashboard; that takes effect immediately.

Do not create several accounts to get around a plan’s limits. If you need more throughput, ask — it is always less work than a workaround.

4. Plans, payment and cancellation

The Free plan costs nothing and needs no card. Paid plans are billed monthly or yearly in euros through Stripe, and each carries the request quota, rate limit and capabilities shown on the pricing page. The limits that apply to you are on your dashboard and on every response, in the RateLimit-* headers. Enterprise is agreed in writing.

You can cancel at any time from the dashboard. Cancelling stops the next renewal and leaves your plan running until the end of the period you have already paid for. Part-periods are not refunded as a rule — but if something went genuinely wrong, write to us and it will be sorted out rather than argued about.

Prices can change. A running subscription keeps billing at the price it was bought at until you change plan; a price change is never applied retroactively.

5. What you may build

Cache responses, store them, put them in your own database, analyse them, display them to your users, and charge for the product you build. Attribution to the publishing operator is expected wherever that operator’s terms ask for it, and the rights status on each figure says when they do.

The limits are narrow and specific. You may not:

• Resell or redistribute the dataset itself, in bulk or as a feed, unless your plan includes redistribution rights — and even then only as far as each publisher's own terms allow.
• Present the data as an operator's official statement, or in a way that implies any operator endorses your product.
• Attempt to exceed your plan's limits by rotating keys, accounts or addresses, or to reach capabilities your plan does not include by any route other than upgrading.
• Use the service to attack, overload or probe the operators whose publications it reads.

Breaking these is grounds for suspending keys. Where a suspension is not urgent you will be told what the problem is and given a chance to fix it first.

6. Where the data comes from, said plainly

The figures are published by grid operators. We read them from public publications, politely and identifiably — how we read sources sets out exactly how. We do not own those publications and we do not claim to.

What we license to you is our access service and our data model: the normalisation, the stable identifiers, the history and the provenance built on top. If a publisher asks us to stop carrying something, we stop, and the API will say so rather than quietly returning less. Treat this as a source that can lose coverage, and do not build something that cannot survive a gap.

7. Availability

The service is provided as it is, with no service level agreement and no uptime guarantee. It runs on a single server. It is monitored and it is looked after, but if you need a contractual availability commitment, it does not exist yet — ask, and we can talk about what it would take.

Endpoints may change. Breaking changes go behind a new API version; the current one is /v1 and it will not be broken underneath you. Additive changes — new fields, new endpoints — can happen at any time, so parse defensively and ignore fields you do not recognise.

8. Liability

The data is provided without warranty of accuracy, completeness or fitness for a purpose. It is reconciled from publications that contain mistakes and go out of date, which means this API contains them too.

To the extent the law allows, liability for any claim arising from this service is limited to what you paid for it in the twelve months before the claim. Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

9. Ending it

You can stop at any time: cancel the plan, revoke the keys, or ask for the account to be deleted and it will be. We can suspend an account for the reasons in section 5, for non-payment, or if we stop operating the service — in which case you get at least 30 days’ notice by email and a refund of any period paid for but not delivered.

10. Law, and changes to these terms

These terms are governed by Belgian law, and the courts of Belgium have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer rather than a business, this does not remove protections that the law of your own country gives you.

If these terms change materially, the date at the top changes and account holders are emailed before it takes effect. Continuing to use the API after that is acceptance; if you would rather not, cancel and you will be refunded for the unused period.

Questions about any of this go to hello@gridcapacityapi.com. See also the privacy policy.