Terms of Service & Fair Use Policy

1. Acceptance of Terms

These Terms of Service ("Terms") constitute a legally binding agreement between you ("User" or "Developer") and CheckAPICost ("we", "our", or "Platform"). Accessing or using any calculator, matrix, or programmatic feed signifies full acceptance of these Terms. If you disagree with any portion of these terms, do not access our services.

2. Permitted Fair Use & Developer Access

CheckAPICost is provided freely for developers, engineering leaders, FinOps analysts, and researchers to model and forecast infrastructure spending:

• Internal Modeling: You may freely use our interactive tools to estimate architectural budgets, compare cloud hosting options, and project AI unit economics for internal commercial planning.
• Programmatic Consumption: Automated bots and scrapers may consume our machine-readable specs (llms.txt, llms-full.txt) provided requests adhere to respectful rate limits (maximum 5 requests per second) and identify their User-Agent.
• Prohibited Misuse: You may not perform volumetric denial-of-service attacks, reverse-engineer proprietary scraping heuristics, or attempt to circumvent security protections.

3. Intellectual Property & Benchmark Data Citation

The compilation, comparative visualizations, interactive calculator logic, and standardized unit economic schemas on CheckAPICost are protected by intellectual property rights.

Citation Rights: We encourage software engineers, bloggers, and academics to cite our findings. You are granted permission to quote CheckAPICost comparison figures, charts, and metrics in technical blog posts, architectural review decks, and research papers, provided you include an active hyperlink attribution to https://checkapicost.com.

4. Third-Party Cloud Billing & Pricing Warranty Disclaimer

While CheckAPICost synchronizes rate sheets daily via automated pipelines, cloud vendors modify pricing terms, tiering thresholds, and promotional discounts at their sole discretion.

• All calculations, estimates, and showdowns are provided strictly for informational and comparative purposes on an "AS IS" and "AS AVAILABLE" basis.
• CheckAPICost does not guarantee that your final invoice from AWS, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Cloud, Twilio, or any other provider will match calculated estimates.
• Variations arise from billing currency exchange rates, regional taxes, dynamic spot market spikes, burst request surcharges, and undocumented minimum increments.

5. Limitation of Liability & Indemnification

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, CheckAPICost, its contributors, and developers shall not be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, consequential, or punitive damages—including but not limited to loss of profits, cloud budget overruns, unexpected vendor invoices, system downtime, or architectural redesign costs—arising from the use of or reliance on data presented on this platform.

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless CheckAPICost, its operators, affiliates, and contributors from and against any claims, liabilities, damages, judgments, awards, losses, costs, or expenses (including reasonable attorneys' fees) arising out of or relating to your violation of these Terms or your use of the platform.

6. Governing Law & Dispute Resolution

These Terms shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the State of Delaware, without giving effect to any principles of conflicts of law. Any legal suit, action, or proceeding arising out of or related to these Terms shall be instituted exclusively in the federal courts or state courts of Delaware.

Class Action Waiver: Any proceedings to resolve or litigate any dispute will be conducted solely on an individual basis. Neither you nor CheckAPICost will seek to have any dispute heard as a class action or representative proceeding.

7. Modifications to Service & Terms

We reserve the right to modify, expand, or deprecate calculators, models, or data endpoints at any time without prior notice. Continued use of CheckAPICost following posted changes constitutes agreement to the updated Terms.

8. Contact & Questions

Inquiries regarding commercial data syndication or legal terms should be directed to [email protected].

7. Automated Scraping & Programmatic Rate Limits

To preserve platform availability and latency for all developers, automated access to CheckAPICost is governed by the following rate rules:

• Machine-Readable Specs: AI agents, IDE extensions, and automated FinOps monitors are encouraged to ingest our standardized llms.txt and llms-full.txt endpoints rather than aggressively crawling raw HTML pages.
• Caching Directives: Clients must respect HTTP Cache-Control headers and implement conditional GET requests using If-Modified-Since or ETag validators.
• Maximum Concurrency: Automated scripts may not exceed a sustained request rate of 5 requests per second from any single IP address or subnet block.

8. Non-Commercial Academic & Research Licensing

Academic institutions, computer science students, and non-profit researchers are granted a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to use CheckAPICost telemetry data for research papers, thesis publications, and educational presentations, provided CheckAPICost is cited as the source.

For enterprise commercial data licensing, white-label cost calculator embedding, or custom API feed syndication, please submit an inquiry through our Contact Portal.