Terms

Short, because a long one would only be read by neither of us.

What you are buying

Access to an API that returns news metadata, publisher URLs and article text, priced in credits. Credits are bought in advance, do not expire, and there is no subscription — stop using it and you owe nothing.

What we charge for

One credit per search, one per article resolved, one per article whose text we actually returned. A request that fails, returns nothing, or returns content: null costs nothing. Your usage page shows every call and what it cost.

Credits are not refundable once spent. If something on our side charged you wrongly, tell us and we will put it back — that is a bug, not a dispute.

What we promise, and what we do not

We publish measured numbers rather than guarantees: roughly 8 articles in 10 return text, resolution succeeds about 98% of the time, and the archive reaches 2010. Those are what we saw when we tested, not a service level. There is no uptime guarantee at this price, and we will tell you plainly if that changes.

The data comes from a public news index we do not control. If it changes what it returns, what we return changes with it.

What we ask of you

• One account per person or organisation, and keep your API key to yourself. Anything done with your key is treated as done by you.
• Stay inside the published rate limits — 10 requests a second and 120 a minute per key. Splitting work across keys to get around them is not allowed.
• Do not resell the raw API as your own, and respect the rights of the publishers whose material you retrieve. What you do with the text is your responsibility, not ours.
• Nothing illegal, and nothing that tries to break the service for other people.

Ending it

You can stop at any time; there is nothing to cancel. We can close an account that breaks these terms, and if we do, we refund credits that were bought and not spent unless they were bought fraudulently.

Changes

If these terms change in a way that affects you, we will say so on this page with the date, and tell existing customers by email. We will not change what a credit costs after you have bought it.

Who we are

hawkcrawl is a small independent operation, not a company with a legal department. That is why these terms are written in plain words: if you need something in them changed to use the service, ask and a person will answer.