Terms of Service

1. The service

Civic Beacon provides an API serving United States federal legislative data — bills, actions, votes, legislators, and AI-generated summaries — compiled from official public sources (Congress.gov, govinfo.gov, and others). The underlying government data is public domain. AI-generated summaries are provided as a convenience and may contain errors; always verify against the official bill text before relying on them publicly.

2. Accounts and API keys

You are responsible for keeping your API key confidential. Test keys expire after 30 days. Paid subscriptions are month-to-month and can be canceled anytime; service continues until the end of the paid period. We may suspend keys that abuse the service (see acceptable use below).

3. Acceptable use

• Use the data in your products, reporting, research, and internal tools — that's what it's for.
• Cache and store responses as needed for your use case.
• Don't resell raw, unmodified API responses as a competing data feed.
• Don't attempt to circumvent rate limits, probe other customers' keys, or disrupt the service.
• Attribution ("Data via Civic Beacon") is appreciated but not required.

4. Availability — the honest version

Civic Beacon is built and operated by a small team. We target high availability and our ingestion pipeline runs on a published schedule (bills update 4× daily on weekdays), but we do not offer a formal uptime SLA at this time. If the service or data freshness matters to a launch or publication deadline, plan for caching on your side. If we have an extended outage, paying customers can ask for a prorated credit and will get one without an argument.

5. Liability

The service is provided "as is." To the maximum extent permitted by law, Civic Beacon is not liable for indirect or consequential damages, and our total liability is limited to the amount you paid in the 3 months before the claim. Legislative data can change; official government sources are authoritative.

6. Changes and contact

We may update these terms; material changes will be emailed to active subscribers. Questions: [email protected].