Terms of Use: Plinth Data

Applies to: data.useplinth.com, the Grants API (/api/v1/* and the legacy unversioned alias), the Ask chat at /analyze, the compliance screening endpoints, ad-hoc SQL, the Plinth × Claude connector, and any bulk extract supplied under them (together, the "Service").

Effective: 24 August 2026 · Version: 1.0

Operated by Time to Spare Ltd, registered in England and Wales (no. 11530023), Space 4, 113–115 Fonthill Road, London N4 3HH, United Kingdom ("Plinth", "we", "us").

These terms govern the Service only. With effect from 24 August 2026 they supersede any earlier terms of use for the Service, and any terms published at useplinth.com or plinth.org.uk, to the extent those would otherwise apply to it. Other Plinth products have their own terms, which continue to govern those products.

Machine-readable. The canonical URL of these terms is published in /.well-known/apis.json and referenced from /llms.txt. Automated clients are expected to read them.

1. How these terms apply to you#

Your position depends on how you use the Service, and we are explicit about this rather than pretending otherwise.

If you browse without an account, we offer the Service on the conditions set out here, and in particular on the disclaimers in sections 3, 15 and 16. We do not claim you have entered a contract with us merely by loading a page.

If you generate an API key, create an account, or subscribe, you accept these terms at that point by an affirmative act, and they are a contract between us.

If you operate an automated agent, section 12 applies and acceptance is recorded as part of key issuance.

If you act for an organization, you confirm you can bind it, and "you" means both.

2. Eligibility#

You must be 18 or over. You must not use the Service if we have previously terminated your access, or if you are located in or ordinarily resident in a territory subject to comprehensive UK, EU or US sanctions, or are a person with whom dealings are prohibited under those regimes.

3. What the Service is, and its limits#

The Service reads public sources (IRS Form 990, 990-EZ and 990-PF e-file data, the IRS Business Master File, USASpending, state transparency checkbooks, and organizations' own public websites) and joins them into a funding graph with derived measures, classifications, clusters, embeddings and narrative reads.

You must understand the following before relying on anything in it. These points are documented at /methodology, /matching, /data-quality and /limitations, and are conditions of use rather than marketing caveats:

• Lag. IRS e-file data reaches us 12–24 months late, so the most recent fiscal years in the corpus are always partial and still arriving. Which years are complete, and which are partial, are stated at /data-quality and returned by /api/v1/meta. Treat only the complete window as a basis for a year-over-year conclusion.
• Paper filers are absent entirely.
• A funding page is a floor, not a census. A substantial minority of grant lines do not resolve to a named recipient. They count in every total, but appear on no recipient's page, so an organization may have funders that do not show. The measured resolved share, and the precision of the matching behind it, are published at /data-quality.
• Federal awards are matched probabilistically by name and location, not by identifier. State coverage is limited to states whose checkbooks publish usable recipient data.
• Derived fields are inferences: support strategy, cause, clusters, similarity, behavioral reads, narrative summaries. They are not figures anyone filed.
• Screens are triage, not determinations. A missing source reports "not screened", never "clear".
• Funding is association, never causation. We show what was filed and what followed. We do not assert one caused the other.

Not advice. Nothing in the Service is legal, tax, accounting, investment, compliance, fundraising or grantmaking advice, and no advisory or fiduciary relationship arises. Verify any figure against the filing it cites before acting on it.

4. Accounts and keys#

Name-to-EIN search (/api/v1/search) and dataset metadata (/api/v1/meta) are keyless. Everything else needs a key.

A key is a secret and identifies your account and allowance. Keep it server-side. Never place it in browser JavaScript, a mobile binary, or a committed file. The API deliberately sends no CORS headers for this reason. Rotate from your account; rotation retires the old key immediately. Report suspected compromise to security@plinth.org.uk.

Do not share, sell, sublicense or transfer a key. You are responsible for every call made with it.

5. Tiers, allowances and changes#

Current allowances and prices are at /developers and /pricing. At the date of these terms: a free key gives 50 grant-graph calls a day; Plus and Pro raise that; organization endpoints (/screening, /essentials, /premier) and ad-hoc SQL require a paid key; the Ask chat gives each visitor three free questions a day, metered separately.

We may change allowances, endpoints, metering and prices. For paid plans we will give at least 30 days' notice of a price rise or a material reduction in your plan, effective at your next renewal, and you may cancel before then. Free allowances may change without notice.

Fees exclude VAT and sales taxes unless stated.

Canceling. You can cancel at any time from your account page. There is no notice period. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the billing period you have already paid for, and you keep your plan until then.

Refunds. We do not refund part of a billing period, unused allowance, or the remaining months of an annual plan. If we have charged you in error, or billed you after you canceled, tell us at support@useplinth.com and we will put it right.

If you are a consumer rather than a business, you may have a statutory right to cancel within 14 days of subscribing. Where you ask us to start straight away and we do, that right ends once we have supplied the Service.

Stability of the v1 API. Within /api/v1 we will not remove, rename or redefine an existing field. We may add fields, endpoints and optional parameters at any time, so your client should tolerate fields it does not recognize. Breaking changes will be made in a new version, and we will keep /api/v1 available for at least 12 months after announcing its retirement.

This commitment is about the shape of the response, not its contents. The underlying records change as filings arrive, as errors are corrected, and where information is withheld under our redactions policy, and section 13 governs that. A field we have promised to keep may legitimately return fewer rows, or none.

The legacy unversioned alias at /api/grants/* is not covered by this commitment and may be retired with 30 days' notice.

We may throttle or suspend access where usage threatens stability for others. Where it is not urgent, we will contact the account owner first.

6. Rights#

The underlying figures are public records, IRS e-file data is public domain, and we claim nothing in them. Go to the source whenever you like.

Ours is what we added: the compilation, entity resolution, matching, classifications, derived measures, embeddings, clusters, narrative reads, schema, API design, and the text, code and design of the Service. These are protected by copyright, UK and EU database right, and other rights owned by or licensed to us.

Your obligations under sections 7–10 are contractual and apply whether or not any particular element attracts intellectual property protection where you are.

7. What you may do#

Subject to these terms and your allowance, you have a non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license to:

• Use results internally for research, analysis, fundraising, grantmaking, diligence and reporting, including within your organization.
• Quote in published work: figures, statistics and short extracts in articles, reports, proposals, applications and academic work, with attribution under section 8, where the extract is incidental to your own work and does not substitute for the Service.
• Display in an application, on a paid key, provided you do not expose your key to end users, do not act as a query proxy for third parties, and do not build or contribute to a competing dataset.

For redistribution, bulk extracts or anything wider, ask us.

8. Attribution#

Credit Plinth and link the page or endpoint the figure came from. Carry the material caveats, at minimum the 12–24 month lag and that funding is association rather than causation. Do not imply we endorse your conclusion, your organization, or any funder or nonprofit.

9. What you may not do#

1. Scrape, crawl or systematically download the Service, or use automated means other than the API in accordance with these terms, /robots.txt and the documented agent paths.
2. Circumvent any rate limit, allowance, metering, authentication or access control, including by rotating keys, creating multiple accounts, distributing requests across IP addresses, VPNs or agents, or misrepresenting yourself in a signed request or agent challenge.
3. Extract or re-utilize a substantial part of the database, or repeatedly extract insubstantial parts to the same effect.
4. Redistribute, resell, sublicense or publish the data in bulk, or build any dataset, index or product that reproduces or substitutes for the Service.
5. Use the Service or its outputs as training or fine-tuning data for a machine learning model. Retrieval for a live query is permitted; retaining a corpus is not.
6. Remove or falsify attribution, citations, caveats or provenance markers, including the x_plinth.warnings block, which exists to tell you what the API could not do.
7. Present inferred or derived fields as filed facts, screens as determinations, or partial fiscal years as complete.
8. Reverse engineer or attempt to derive the source, models or matching logic, except where that restriction is unenforceable.
9. Probe, load-test or attack the Service. Report vulnerabilities to security@plinth.org.uk (RFC 9116, /.well-known/security.txt); ask and we will give you a testing window.
10. Breach applicable law or a third party's rights.

10. Prohibited uses of information about people#

The Service contains information about identifiable individuals drawn from public filings. These restrictions are absolute and apply on every tier, free and paid.

You must not use the Service or anything obtained from it:

• As a consumer report. We are not a consumer reporting agency and our outputs are not consumer reports under the US Fair Credit Reporting Act (15 U.S.C. § 1681 et seq.) or any state analogue. You must not use them as a factor in establishing an individual's eligibility for credit, insurance, employment, housing, or any other FCRA-covered purpose.
• For employment, tenant or background screening, or to compile a profile of an individual for those purposes.
• To harass, stalk, threaten, intimidate, dox or target anyone, or to compile home addresses, contact details or personal profiles of individuals.
• To make a final sanctions, watchlist or legal-status determination. The OFAC, IRS bulletin and California registration screens at /screening are triage. Confirm against the primary source before acting.
• For purposes prohibited by anti-discrimination law.
• In breach of applicable data protection law, in your jurisdiction or ours.

Where we withhold information under our redactions policy, you must not attempt to reconstruct, re-identify or infer what was withheld, whether by cross-referencing other sources, by querying the API or SQL, or by prompting the Ask chat.

Breach of this section is material and we may terminate immediately.

11. The Ask chat, SQL and AI features#

The Ask chat generates its own SQL, shows you the query, and cites the filings. Ad-hoc SQL (POST /api/v1/sql) is read-only, capped at 2,000 rows and canceled after 30 seconds. Both are also reachable through the Plinth × Claude connector.

• Outputs are generated, not retrieved from a reviewed answer set. They can be wrong or incomplete even where the underlying figures are right. Read the query and check the filing.
• Outputs are not advice (section 3).
• We process prompts using third-party AI providers. Do not enter personal data, applicant or grantee information, credentials, or anything confidential. You do not need to, because the corpus is public data. How we handle prompts is in the Privacy Notice.
• We do not keep your prompts as a record. We count questions asked so that allowances can be metered, but not their content. Request data may pass through short-lived operational logs for security, abuse detection and debugging, and is cleared on our normal log cycle.
• We claim no ownership of your prompts; you grant us a non-exclusive license for those purposes. Outputs are not guaranteed unique.
• The restrictions in sections 9 and 10 apply in full to anything you obtain through the chat, SQL or the connector.

12. Automated agents#

We publish two agent paths: RFC 9421 HTTP Message Signatures under the Web Bot Auth profile, and a challenge-based trial key from POST /api/v1/agent-key with anonymous, signed, attested and trusted tiers.

If you operate an agent: identify yourself accurately, do not misrepresent the host or key you control, answer challenges honestly, and stay within your tier. The purpose and source values are required, unverified, and recorded, they must be truthful. Automated access outside these paths, or in breach of section 9, is unauthorized.

You are responsible for what your agent does, whether or not a human reviewed it. Where you operate an agent for a principal, you confirm you have authority to accept these terms on their behalf.

13. Corrections, objections and takedowns#

We fix errors at source. Email data@useplinth.com with the EIN and the filing you are reading.

If you are an individual named in the Service, see /redactions and Part B of the Privacy Notice, which set out what we withhold and how to object.

We may remove, amend, suppress or annotate any content at any time, and are not obliged to keep any particular page, figure, record or endpoint available. This is about what the Service contains, and it is how corrections, redactions and objections take effect.

It does not override the v1 API stability commitment at section 5, which governs the shape of API responses and the notice you get before a version is retired.

14. Suspension and termination#

You may stop at any time and close your account from your account page; paid accounts end at the close of the billing period unless agreed otherwise.

We may suspend or terminate for breach (especially sections 9, 10 and 12), where usage threatens the Service, where required by law, for non-payment, or on reasonable notice if we discontinue the Service. Where circumstances allow we will contact the account owner first.

On termination your license ends and you must stop using and delete Plinth-derived data, except figures already published with attribution, copies required by law, and routine backups you do not restore. Sections 3, 6, 8, 9, 10, 15, 16, 17 survive.

15. Disclaimers#

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available". To the fullest extent permitted by law we exclude all warranties, conditions and representations not expressly stated, whether express, implied or statutory, including merchantability, satisfactory quality, fitness for purpose, accuracy and non-infringement.

We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, secure or error-free; that any figure, match, classification, inference, screen or AI output is accurate, complete or current; that any organization's page is a complete account of its funding; or that defects will be corrected.

We are not responsible for the content or accuracy of the underlying public filings, or for third-party sites we link to.

Nothing excludes liability for death or personal injury from negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded. Some jurisdictions do not permit certain exclusions, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

16. Limitation of liability#

Subject to section 15, and to the fullest extent permitted by law:

• We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive loss; or loss of profit, revenue, funding, grants, contracts, opportunity, goodwill or data; or business interruption.
• We are not liable for loss arising from any decision taken in reliance on the Service, funding, grantmaking, diligence, screening, investment or employment.
• Our total aggregate liability is limited to the greater of (a) fees you paid us in the 12 months before the claim and (b) US$100.

This allocation reflects that most of the Service is free and that every figure is traceable to a public source you can verify yourself.

17. Indemnity#

You will indemnify us against claims, losses, liabilities, costs and reasonable legal fees arising from your use of the Service in breach of these terms, your breach of sections 9 or 10, your infringement of third-party rights, or your onward publication of anything obtained from the Service.

18. Changes#

We may change these terms. We will post the updated version with a new version number and date, and where you hold an account, email the owner at least 30 days before material changes take effect. Continued use after that date is acceptance.

19. Governing law and disputes#

Governed by the law of England and Wales; the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction, except that we may seek relief to protect our intellectual property or restrain unauthorized access anywhere. Nothing deprives a consumer of mandatory protections in their country of residence.

20. General#

These terms, the Privacy Notice, and any order form are the entire agreement as to the Service, and supersede any prior or contemporaneous terms, representations or understandings relating to it, including anything published at useplinth.com or plinth.org.uk. Where those documents and these terms could both be read as applying to the Service, these prevail. Unenforceable provisions are severed. Failure to enforce is not waiver. You may not assign without consent; we may assign to an affiliate or on a sale of the business. No third-party beneficiaries. Neither party is liable for events beyond reasonable control.

21. Contact#

General: hello@useplinth.com · API and data corrections: data@useplinth.com · Security: security@plinth.org.uk · Privacy: support@useplinth.com

Time to Spare Ltd, Space 4, 113–115 Fonthill Road, London N4 3HH, UK. Registered in England and Wales, no. 11530023.