Version 2026-09-01-r12 · read against the privacy notice on 2026-09-01
RateGrid is free while coverage is being built out. There is no paid plan on sale, no card is collected, and nothing here creates a payment obligation.
Being free does not make the rest of this document decorative: everything the API returns is an estimate, not a bill, and sections 5 and 6 below set out what it does and does not account for. Read them before relying on any figure — particularly for solar payback, battery sizing, or a decision to switch rate plans. If you are putting RateGrid output in front of your own customers, section 14 is the one that applies to you.
1.1 Parties. These Terms of Service (the "Terms") are an agreement between you and RateGrid LLC, a Wisconsin limited liability company ("RateGrid", "we", "us").
1.2 How you accept. You accept these Terms by ticking the acceptance box at signup. That is the only way to enter into them. The box cannot be ticked until the text has been scrolled to the end, and the version identifier and SHA-256 hash of the exact text shown to you are recorded with your acceptance, together with the time and the source address. GET /terms/version returns the current values; GET /terms/versions and GET /terms/archive/{sha256} return earlier ones, so the text you accepted can be produced later.
1.2.1 Afterwards. Once you have accepted, continuing to use an API key or the Service reaffirms these Terms as they then stand, and section 23 governs how a change is notified and when it takes effect. This subsection is about a party who has already accepted; it is not an alternative way of accepting. Nobody becomes bound by these Terms merely by using the Service without having ticked the box.
1.3 Order of precedence. If RateGrid and you sign a separate written agreement, order form or addendum covering the service, that document controls over these Terms to the extent of any conflict, for the subject matter it covers.
1.4 Definitions.
2.1 You must be at least 18 years old and legally capable of entering a contract.
2.2 If you open an account for or use the Service on behalf of a company, partnership, agency or other organization, you represent that you are authorized to bind it, and "you" means both you and that organization.
2.3 The Service is a tool for building software. It is not directed to children, and RateGrid does not knowingly permit anyone under 18 to open an account or use the Service.
2.4 You may not use the Service if you are located in, or ordinarily resident in, a country or territory subject to comprehensive U.S. economic sanctions, or if you appear on a U.S. government restricted-party list.
2.5 Where the Service is offered. RateGrid is operated from the United States and is offered to and directed at the United States market only. It encodes United States electricity tariffs filed with United States regulators, for United States service territories; it is priced in United States dollars; and it is not marketed to, or targeted at, any other country. Nothing prevents you reaching it from elsewhere, but doing so is your own initiative and not an offering made to you where you are, and RateGrid does not undertake to comply with the consumer or data-protection law of any country other than the United States. If you need a service that does, this is not it.
3.1 Registration. An account requires a working email address, which is verified before any key is issued. The information you give at signup must be accurate, and you must keep the address current — it is the only recovery path.
3.2 Your key is your identity. Your API key authenticates every request. RateGrid stores only a hash and a short prefix, and cannot recover a lost key — it can only issue a new one.
3.2.1 Responsibility for use. You are responsible for activity conducted using your key, including quota consumption, conduct under section 7, and any charges incurred under a paid plan you have purchased under 17.3. You are not responsible for activity occurring after RateGrid receives notice that your key has been compromised and has had a reasonable opportunity to revoke it, or for activity caused by RateGrid's own breach of these Terms or of applicable law. RateGrid may treat requests bearing your key as authorized for operational purposes until the key is revoked, and may investigate suspected compromise.
3.3 Keeping the key secret. You must:
3.3.1 Signing secrets. RateGrid issues a separate secret for each webhook endpoint you register, used to sign the deliveries sent to that endpoint. The obligations in 3.3 apply to a signing secret as they apply to your key. Two things about it differ, and both follow from how it is issued:
3.4 Compromise. If your key is exposed, revoke it yourself: POST /keys/revoke with the key kills it immediately, and /keys/reset issues a replacement. RateGrid may also revoke or rotate a key at any time where it has reason to believe the key has been exposed, is being used in breach of these Terms, or is threatening the Service. Where practical you will be told; where the risk is live, revocation comes first. A signing secret is not revoked the same way and there is no revoke call for one: delete the endpoint with DELETE /webhooks/{id} and register a new one, which issues a new secret. RateGrid may also rotate the key that signing secrets are derived from; where it does, endpoints already registered continue to verify under the version they were issued with until you re-register, and if that version is ever withdrawn RateGrid stops sending to the endpoint rather than signing with a key you cannot check.
3.5 Account requests are handled manually. Account, access and deletion requests are reviewed and actioned by hand rather than through a self-service tool, and identity is verified before an account is changed on request. Allow a few business days for one.
RateGrid provides electricity tariff data and calculated bill estimates through an API. Tariff Data is transcribed from rate schedules filed by utilities with their regulators. Each record carries a citation to its source document and an effective date, source documents are polled on a schedule, and encoded rates are checked against the filed sheets.
Coverage is limited relative to the full U.S. utility market, and it changes. What is currently covered, and how current it is, is published on the rates and status pages and returned by GET /health. No figure for it is stated here, so that this document does not go stale each time a utility is added.
5.1 Every figure returned by the Service is an estimate. It is not a bill, not a quotation, not an offer of service, and not a statement of what any utility will charge.
5.2 Actual bills depend on metering and meter data quality, billing-cycle timing, programs the customer is enrolled in, taxes and franchise fees, non-bypassable charges, true-up mechanics, and rate changes taking effect after a calculation is made.
5.3 RateGrid does not guarantee, and gives no assurance as to: any savings; any payback period; any bill reduction; the selection of the cheapest or most suitable rate plan; the economics of any battery, solar array or other equipment; eligibility for any tariff, program, rebate, incentive or tax credit; or the outcome of any interconnection or enrollment application.
5.4 Where the Service reports a best-case or optimal dispatch result, that figure is an explicit upper bound computed with perfect foresight. It is not an achievable schedule and must not be presented as one.
5.5 The Service does not provide financial, investment, tax, engineering, or legal advice. Decisions about buying equipment, changing rate plans, or representing savings to anyone else are yours.
6.1 Warnings are part of the answer. API responses carry warnings fields, confidence values, and — for address resolution — an explicit confidence value. These are a material part of the Output, not commentary on it. You must review and appropriately handle the warnings, confidence values and other verification information returned with Output, including in any application that presents or relies on Output.
6.2 You may not treat a result reported as ambiguous or unverified as a determination, present a figure carrying a warning as though it carried none, or rely on a figure whose warning says it should not be relied on for the purpose you are using it for.
6.3 Citations are provenance, not currency. A source citation, sheet number or effective date records the document a figure was transcribed from and when that document took effect. It is not a representation that the underlying filing remains the utility's currently applicable tariff, that no superseding filing exists, or that any source has been re-checked as of the moment of your request. Tariff Data is provided subject to source availability and verification status, both of which are published on the status page and via GET /health.
6.4 Known limitations. The Service does not model, or models only partially, certain tariffs, charges, programs and geographic determinations. The current Documentation and the warnings returned with Output identify them. Examples have included medical baseline allowances, FERA, annual true-up, non-bypassable charges assessed on gross consumption, commercial and industrial tariffs, demand charges, export compensation set by a Community Choice Aggregator, and baseline territories that a tariff defines by prose geographic boundaries and that therefore cannot be resolved automatically. Reading the current list is your responsibility.
6.5 Customer verification. You are responsible for confirming that the tariff, utility, territory, program status, billing assumptions and other inputs supplied to the Service correspond to the customer and circumstance for which the Output is used. RateGrid computes on the inputs it is given.
You must not, and must not permit anyone else to:
(a) use the Service in violation of any law, regulation or third-party right, including consumer-protection, advertising, telemarketing, home-solicitation, contractor-licensing and data-protection laws;
(b) exceed your quota, evade or interfere with metering, rate limiting or authentication, or open multiple accounts to obtain more free capacity than one account allows;
(c) resell, sublicense, republish or redistribute Tariff Data or Output other than as section 9 permits, or use either to reconstruct or populate a dataset or database that reproduces a substantial part of the Tariff Data, or to build a product or service whose primary purpose is to provide access to electricity tariff data;
(d) systematically extract, scrape, crawl, mirror or bulk-download the Service, the website, the rates pages or the Tariff Data, by any means other than the API used within your quota;
(e) reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the Service, or attempt to derive its source code, models or database structure, except to the extent that restriction is unenforceable by law;
(f) probe, scan or test the vulnerability of the Service, or breach or circumvent its security or authentication, without RateGrid's prior written permission;
(g) interfere with or place an unreasonable load on the Service or its infrastructure, including through denial-of-service traffic, unbounded retry loops, or automated polling more frequent than the Documentation permits;
(h) transmit malware, or upload data intended to corrupt, exhaust or manipulate the Service or its results;
(i) impersonate RateGrid, any utility, any regulator or any other person, or state or imply that Output is a utility bill, a utility quotation, or approved, certified or endorsed by any utility or regulator;
(j) use the Service to make or support a decision about a person's eligibility for credit, insurance, housing, employment or any government benefit, or in any way that would make RateGrid a consumer reporting agency;
(k) remove, obscure or alter any citation, effective date, warning, confidence value, statement that a figure is under query, attribution or disclosure block attached to Output. The disclosure block carries the wording section 14.3 requires you to show a consumer; stripping it from a response and then showing the figure to a consumer breaches this paragraph and 14.3 together.
7.1 Security research. If you believe you have found a vulnerability, email support@rategrid.dev. RateGrid will not pursue a claim under 7(f) against research that is reported promptly, stays within your own account, avoids other users' data, and does not degrade the Service.
8.1 Quotas. Access is metered in credits. Your account's allowance, and the cost of each endpoint, are published in the Documentation, listed at GET /plans, and returned for your account by GET /usage. Allowances, credit costs, rate limits and request-size limits may change; a change that reduces the free tier's allowance takes effect under section 23.
8.2 Credits. Credits are an accounting device, not currency or property. They have no cash value, are not refundable, and expire at the end of the period they were granted for unless the Documentation says otherwise.
8.3 Versions and compatibility. RateGrid may add endpoints, fields and parameters at any time; your integration must tolerate unknown fields in a response rather than failing on them. Removing an endpoint or field, or changing the meaning of one, is a breaking change and is handled under section 23.
8.4 Experimental endpoints. An endpoint, field or dataset marked beta, experimental or preview may change or be withdrawn at any time without notice, and is excluded from any commitment in these Terms.
8.5 Caching. You may cache Output as section 9 permits. You must not cache in a way that defeats metering, and you must not present a cached figure as current without regard to its effective date and the change record at GET /changes.
9.1 License. Subject to these Terms and to your compliance with them, RateGrid grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable, worldwide, revocable license, during the term, to:
(a) call the API and use the Output for your internal business purposes, including analysis, modeling and planning;
(b) store and cache Output, and incorporate it into your own application, product, report, quotation or proposal;
(c) display Output, and figures derived from it, to your own employees and to your own customers and prospective customers — including in solar and battery proposals, bill comparisons and savings estimates — subject to section 14;
(d) display individual tariff figures with their citation and effective date attached, in a manner that does not amount to redistribution of the dataset; and
(e) reproduce screenshots and individual figures in marketing, articles, presentations and documentation, with attribution to RateGrid.
9.2 Derived results. Figures you calculate from Output together with your own data — a proposal, a payback model, a customer-facing bill estimate — are yours to use, subject to 9.3. RateGrid claims no ownership of your proposals or of your customers' documents.
9.3 Restrictions. The license in 9.1 does not permit you to:
(a) redistribute, publish, sell or make available the Tariff Data, or a substantial part of it, as data — whether as a file, a feed, an API, a database, a spreadsheet or a scraped copy;
(b) assemble Output from repeated calls into a dataset that reproduces a substantial part of the Tariff Data, whether for your own use, for resale, or for release to the public;
(c) use the Tariff Data or Output to train, fine-tune or evaluate a machine-learning model, or to build a retrieval corpus, whose purpose or effect is to reproduce a substantial part of the Tariff Data or to answer tariff queries without calling the Service. Calling the Service as a live data source from within your own application, including an application built on a language model that retrieves Output at request time, is permitted; so is using Output in models that forecast, size, price or optimise your own customers' systems;
(d) provide the Service to a third party as a service of your own, other than by using Output within your product as 9.1 and 9.5 permit; or
(e) remove or alter citations, effective dates or warnings, contrary to section 7(k).
9.4 Reservation. All rights not expressly granted are reserved. The license is not a sale. It terminates when these Terms terminate, or as otherwise provided in section 18.
9.5 Users of your application. The words "non-sublicensable" in 9.1 restrict onward licensing of the Service and the Tariff Data. They do not prevent you from permitting users of your application to view Output incorporated into that application, provided those users do not receive independent access to the Service, an API key, or a downloadable copy of the Tariff Data or a substantial part of it. Those users are not RateGrid licensees, and their use of your application is your responsibility under section 14.
9.6 Verifying compliance with 9.3. If RateGrid has a reasonable and specific basis to believe you are breaching 9.3(a), (b) or (c) — a call pattern consistent with enumerating the dataset rather than serving your own users, or Tariff Data appearing somewhere it could only have come from your key — it may ask you, in writing and not more than once in twelve months absent a further specific basis, to describe how Output obtained with your key is stored, used and disposed of, and to confirm in writing that you are complying. You will answer within thirty days. RateGrid may not inspect your systems, your source code or your customers' data under this subsection, and anything you provide is your Confidential Information under section 25.
9.7 Stipulated remedy. Loss from reconstructing the Tariff Data is real and close to impossible to prove: what is taken is the value of a dataset that took years to build, and a copy destroys it quietly. So for a breach of 9.3(a) or 9.3(b) that reproduces a substantial part of the Tariff Data, the parties agree that $25,000 per incident is a reasonable estimate of that loss, made in advance because proof after the fact is impracticable, and is not a penalty. It is RateGrid's sole monetary remedy for that breach unless RateGrid can prove actual damages, in which case it may elect those instead. This does not limit either party's right to injunctive relief under 22.6.
10.1 RateGrid's rights. As between you and RateGrid, RateGrid owns the Service and all rights in it, including: the API and its software; the billing engines; the website, the Documentation and their text and design; the encoded representation of each tariff and the schema it is expressed in; the selection, arrangement, structure and labeling of the Tariff Data; the archive of fetched source documents and the change history derived from it; the verification and monitoring system; and the name "RateGrid", its logo and its API labels.
10.2 The underlying filings. The utility rate schedules RateGrid transcribes are public regulatory filings and RateGrid claims no ownership of them. RateGrid's rights are in its transcription, encoding, verification, arrangement and software — and in the contractual restrictions in section 9, which apply to Tariff Data whatever the copyright position of any individual figure.
10.3 Your rights. You own your Customer Inputs, your application, and your own materials. Nothing here transfers them to RateGrid.
10.4 Feedback. If you send suggestions, bug reports or feature requests, RateGrid may use them without restriction or obligation to you. You keep whatever rights you had in them.
11.1 Ownership and license. You own your Customer Inputs. You grant RateGrid a license to host, process, transmit and display them solely to operate the Service, to produce your Output, and to do what section 12 and the privacy notice describe. That license is limited to what running the Service requires.
11.2 Retention. Load profiles, PV production profiles, monthly kWh figures and hourly interval data sent to /calculate, /compare, /solar, /battery and /sizing are processed to compute the response and are then discarded. RateGrid does not log request or response bodies. Usage records note that an endpoint was called, not what was sent to it.
11.3 No training on your inputs. RateGrid does not use Customer Inputs to train machine-learning models, and does not sell, rent or share them.
11.4 Your customers' data. If Customer Inputs relate to an identifiable person — a homeowner's address, their interval data, their enrollment in CARE or FERA — you represent and warrant that you have the rights, notices and consents needed to collect that data and to send it to RateGrid for processing, and that doing so does not breach any law or agreement you are bound by.
11.5 Roles. Where Customer Inputs contain personal information, you are the business or controller and RateGrid is your service provider, contractor or processor. RateGrid processes that information only on your documented instructions, which these Terms and your use of the API constitute. RateGrid does not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined under the California Consumer Privacy Act. The terms that the applicable statute requires between us are in 11.9; they apply without a separate signature.
11.6 What you must not send. Do not send special categories of data, government identifiers, financial-account or payment-card numbers, health information, or anything subject to HIPAA, GLBA or FERPA. The API needs consumption, location and system parameters, and nothing else. Data you send in breach of this clause is sent at your own risk and is your responsibility, and if RateGrid becomes aware that it holds such data it may delete it without notice.
11.7 Income-qualified flags. The care and low_income parameters record a household's participation in an income-qualified program. Treat them as sensitive in your own systems.
11.8 Address resolution. POST /resolve makes up to three outbound lookups:
(a) the address you supply goes to the U.S. Census Bureau's public geocoder (geocoding.geo.census.gov), which returns coordinates and a county. If you call with coordinates instead, they go to the same geocoder for the county, unless you supply the county yourself;
(b) those coordinates go to the National Laboratory of the Rockies, formerly the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (developer.nlr.gov), on every call, to identify the serving utility; and
(c) those coordinates go to the U.S. Geological Survey's elevation service (epqs.nationalmap.gov), but only where the county's baseline territories are split by elevation.
Each request leaves the Service and is handled under that organization's own terms. Neither address nor coordinates are stored by RateGrid; the elevation result is held in memory against rounded coordinates only. If you would rather not send a location, pass a tariff label to the calculation endpoints directly — none of them makes an outbound call.
11.9 Service provider terms. This subsection is the contract that the California Consumer Privacy Act and its regulations require between a business and its service provider, and that comparable state laws require between a controller and its processor. It is here, rather than in an addendum you have to ask for, so that every customer has it by default. RateGrid:
(a) will not retain, use or disclose personal information contained in Customer Inputs for any purpose other than the business purposes specified in these Terms — providing the Service, computing and returning Output, and operating and securing the Service — or as the applicable statute otherwise permits;
(b) will not retain, use or disclose that information for any commercial purpose of its own, including any purpose unrelated to providing the Service to you;
(c) will not sell or share that information, and will not retain, use or disclose it outside the direct business relationship between you and RateGrid;
(d) will not combine it with personal information received from any other source, except as the applicable statute permits a service provider to do;
(e) certifies that it understands the restrictions in (a) to (d) and will comply with them;
(f) will assist you, by reasonable and appropriate means and taking into account the nature of the processing, in responding to a verifiable consumer request to know, delete or correct, and in meeting your own security and assessment obligations;
(g) will notify you without undue delay if it determines it can no longer meet its obligations under the applicable statute, and grants you the right, on notice, to take reasonable and appropriate steps to stop and remediate unauthorized use of personal information; and
(h) engages the subprocessors identified in the privacy notice, each under written terms no less protective than these, and will give notice before adding another.
11.10 Nature and duration of the processing. The subject matter is the calculation of electricity bill estimates. The individuals are the utility customers to whom Customer Inputs relate. The categories of personal information are those the API accepts: location, consumption and system parameters, and income-qualified program flags. Processing lasts for the duration of the request. Section 11.2 governs retention and nothing in 11.9 or this subsection extends it.
11.11 A separate addendum. These Terms are intended to satisfy the contracting requirement without one. If your own compliance program requires a signed document, the data processing addendum reproduces 11.5 and 11.9 to 11.10 in standalone form and may be executed under section 1.3. It grants nothing further and imposes nothing further; signing it changes no obligation on either side.
12.1 The privacy notice forms part of these Terms and governs RateGrid's processing of personal information about you and about people whose data passes through the Service. If these Terms and the privacy notice conflict concerning that processing, the privacy notice controls solely with respect to that processing, and these Terms continue to govern everything else. Nothing in the privacy notice may reduce the express commitments in sections 11.2 and 11.3 without an amendment to these Terms or to your applicable written agreement.
13.1 RateGrid is independent. No utility, Community Choice Aggregator, regulator, public utility commission, laboratory or government body sponsors, endorses, certifies, approves, licenses or is affiliated with RateGrid, unless RateGrid expressly says so in writing and identifies that body by name.
13.2 Utility names, tariff names, schedule numbers and program names are used for identification only, are the marks of their owners, and their use does not imply any relationship.
13.3 Output has not been reviewed or approved by any utility or regulator, and is not a determination of any utility's charges.
This section applies where you present Output, or figures derived from it, to consumers or to your own customers.
14.1 You must not present Output as a bill, as a utility quotation, or as approved by a utility or regulator.
14.2 You must not present a best-case or perfect-foresight dispatch figure as an achievable result, and must not represent guaranteed savings, guaranteed payback, or a guaranteed bill outcome on the strength of Output.
14.3 The disclosure you must make. Wherever you show a consumer a figure derived from Output, you must show, with it, the disclosure in Exhibit A. It must appear in the same view as the figure — not behind a link, a tooltip, a footnote marker or a separate page — and must be at least as legible as the figure it qualifies. You may reword it to match your own voice provided every element in Exhibit A survives the rewording. If you do reword it, the responsibility for the result is yours under 14.4.
14.3.1 Where a response carries a warning, a reduced confidence value or an unverified status, and you present the figure from that response to a consumer anyway, you must say so alongside the figure. The disclosure field returned with the response carries the wording for this, and 7(k) prohibits removing it.
14.4 You are solely responsible for your own customer-facing claims and for complying with the laws that govern them — including consumer-protection and advertising law, contractor licensing, and the disclosure rules that apply to solar and storage sales in the jurisdictions where you sell. RateGrid does not review your materials and takes no responsibility for them.
14.5 Your relationship with your customer is yours alone. Your customers are not third-party beneficiaries of these Terms.
15.1 RateGrid depends on documents and systems it does not control: utility filings and their publication schedules; regulator websites and document repositories; the U.S. Census Bureau geocoder, the National Laboratory of the Rockies utility lookup and the U.S. Geological Survey elevation service used by /resolve; hosting and network providers; and email delivery and DNS.
15.2 RateGrid is not responsible for: errors, omissions, ambiguities or inconsistencies in a utility's own filed documents; a utility filing a change without publishing it, or publishing it late or in an unreadable form; a source document or regulator website becoming unavailable, moving or changing format; a tariff, program or incentive being changed, suspended or withdrawn; or the independent acts, outages, errors or terms of any third-party service on which the Service depends.
15.3 Where the utility lookup in 11.8(b) is unavailable or rate-limited, /resolve reports the result as unverified rather than assuming a serving utility. That degraded result is a disclosure under 6.1 and 6.2, and must be handled as one.
15.4 Where the Service reports that a source could not be fetched, has not been re-checked, or has changed and not yet been re-encoded, that report is the disclosure — the figures affected are provided as they stand.
15.5 Your use of those sources, through us. Calling /resolve causes RateGrid to make requests to the U.S. Census Bureau, the National Laboratory of the Rockies and, conditionally, the U.S. Geological Survey, on your behalf and driven by your volume. Those services publish their own terms and acceptable-use rules, including rate limits and restrictions on bulk or automated querying. You will not use the Service in a way that would breach those rules if you were making the requests yourself, and in particular you will not use /resolve to enumerate territories, to build a competing lookup, or at a volume whose purpose is to extract those services' data rather than to serve your own users. If one of those providers restricts, rate-limits or blocks RateGrid because of your usage, RateGrid may suspend or limit your access under section 18.2 to restore the Service for everyone else, and will tell you why.
15.6 Figures under query. Where RateGrid has received a report that a rate does not match the utility's filed sheet, and has not yet resolved it, the affected figures are served with that fact stated in the disclosure block of the response. That statement is the report 15.4 describes, and 6.1 makes it part of the Output. You must not present a figure as settled while the response says a query against it is open, and 7(k) prohibits removing that statement from what you show.
15.6.1 A report attaches to the specific version of a rate record it was made against, identified by that record's label and effective date. A later filing is a different record: it does not inherit an open query, and it is not made current by one being resolved. RateGrid gives no undertaking here as to how quickly a query is resolved — 16.3 governs support, and this clause governs only what the Service says while a query is open.
16.1 The Service is provided on a best-effort basis. There is no uptime commitment, no service level agreement, no support commitment and no response-time commitment. It may change, degrade, be interrupted or be discontinued.
16.2 RateGrid may perform maintenance, impose emergency rate limits, or take the Service down without notice.
16.3 Support is a single email address, answered as time permits. There is no telephone support, no support portal, and no guaranteed response time.
16.4 If RateGrid discontinues the Service generally, it will use reasonable efforts to give at least 30 days' notice by email to accounts with a verified address — except where earlier discontinuation is reasonably necessary for security, legal or regulatory reasons, or is caused by circumstances beyond RateGrid's reasonable control, in which case notice will be given as soon as practicable.
17.1 Today. No fees are charged. No payment details are collected. Nothing in these Terms obliges you to pay anything.
17.2 If paid plans are introduced. Existing accounts remain on the free tier unless they choose to subscribe. Use of the Service will not begin costing money without an explicit purchase by you.
17.3 Terms of any future paid service. Paid plans will be governed by these Terms together with the plan terms or order form presented at purchase, which will set out price, billing period, renewal, cancellation, refunds, overages, taxes and price-change notice. Where those plan terms conflict with these Terms, they control for the paid service.
17.4 Payment card details will be handled by a payment processor and will not reach RateGrid.
17.5 The free tier may be changed, limited or withdrawn under section 23.
17.5.1 When 17.6 to 17.11 apply. 17.6 to 17.11 describe how the metering, quota and subscription mechanics already implemented in the Service behave. They apply today, to the free tier, notwithstanding the heading of this section, and will apply to any paid plan except where the plan terms under 17.3 say otherwise.
17.6 Credits reset monthly, on your billing date. For a paid plan, usage is counted against your subscription's current billing period as operated by the payment processor: the period begins on the date you subscribed and renews on that date each month, so your allowance resets when you are charged rather than on the first of the month. Where a month has no corresponding day, the period ends on the last day of that month. For an account without a paid subscription, including the free tier, the period is the calendar month beginning at 00:00 UTC on the first day of each month. If RateGrid has not received the payment processor's renewal notification by the time a period ends, the period is advanced by one month locally, so an allowance always resets on schedule.
17.7 Credits do not roll over and are not refundable. An allowance is a ceiling on consumption within one period as defined in 17.6, not a balance you own. Unused credits expire at the end of the period and have no cash value, are not carried forward, and are not refunded on downgrade, cancellation or termination — except where a refund is required by applicable law, in which case that law governs and this clause does not narrow it.
17.8 What happens when an allowance is exhausted. Metered requests are refused with HTTP 429 until the period resets or the allowance is raised. There is no overage, and no charge is incurred by attempting a request after exhaustion. Endpoints that cost zero credits — including GET /usage, GET /plans, GET /health and key revocation — continue to work, so an exhausted account can always read its own consumption and manage its own key. A request already in flight may complete and settle slightly beyond the allowance where its cost scales with the work performed; that overshoot is bounded by the variable portion of a single request and is never billed.
17.9 Changing plan. A change of plan takes effect on the allowance as soon as RateGrid is notified of it by the payment processor. Consumption already recorded in the current period continues to count toward the new allowance; changing plan does not by itself reset the period, which continues to run to its existing renewal date. Money — proration, credit notes and invoicing on upgrade or downgrade — is handled by the payment processor under the plan terms, not by the Service.
17.10 Failed payment and cancellation. If a subscription is canceled, or if the payment processor reports a failed payment, the account reverts to the free tier's allowance. Your API key is not revoked and your account is not deleted; the key keeps working at the free allowance, and encoded data and Output already delivered to you are unaffected. Reverting to the free tier on a failed payment is not a suspension under section 18 and does not require the notice that section describes. Any dunning, retry or grace period before a payment is treated as failed is a function of the payment processor's configuration and the plan terms.
17.11 Price changes. RateGrid may change the price of a plan. A price change affecting an existing paid subscription takes effect no earlier than the start of the billing period beginning at least 30 days after notice is sent to the address on the account.
17.11.1 Two notices, not one. The first is that 30-day notice. The second is a reminder sent between 30 and 7 days before the change actually takes effect, stating the new price, the date it applies, and how to cancel. The second exists because California's automatic renewal law requires notice of a price change inside a window that ends 7 days before it happens — so a single notice sent far enough ahead to satisfy the contract can fall outside the window the statute requires, and being early is not a defense to being outside it.
17.11.2 Canceling before a price change. You may cancel at any point before a change takes effect, in the way described in 17.12; continuing to use a paid plan after that date is acceptance of the new price. A change to the price or allowance of a plan you are not subscribed to does not affect your subscription until you change plan.
17.12 Canceling. You may cancel a paid plan at any time, without contacting anyone, from the same place you bought it: POST /billing/cancel with your key, or the cancel link on your billing page, whichever route you used to subscribe. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the billing period you have already paid for, and the account then reverts to the free tier under 17.10 — your key keeps working and your account is not deleted. RateGrid will not require a phone call, a retention conversation, or an email to support in order to cancel.
17.13 What you are told before you buy, and after. Before any purchase, the automatic renewal terms — the price, the billing period, that it renews until canceled, and how to cancel — are presented on the checkout page itself, and you consent to them separately from these Terms. After the purchase, an acknowledgment is emailed to the address on your account repeating those terms and the cancellation instructions. The record of that consent is retained for at least three years, or one year after the subscription ends, whichever is longer.
18.1 By you. Stop using the Service, and revoke your key. You may ask for your account to be deleted at support@rategrid.dev.
18.2 Suspension. RateGrid may suspend or limit your access, or revoke a key, immediately and without prior notice, where it reasonably believes that: these Terms have been breached, particularly section 7; your key is compromised or being used by someone else; your usage is threatening the integrity, security, availability or cost of the Service; the use is unlawful or exposes RateGrid to legal risk; or an account was opened to evade a quota or an earlier suspension.
18.3 Notice and restoration. Where practical, RateGrid will tell you why and what to fix, and will restore access once the cause is resolved. Where the risk is live, suspension comes first and explanation follows.
18.4 Termination. You may terminate these Terms at any time by ceasing to use the Service and revoking your key.
18.4.1 By RateGrid. RateGrid may terminate these Terms or your account at any time and for any reason. For an ordinary termination it will make reasonable efforts to give at least 14 days' notice by email to the address on your account. RateGrid may terminate immediately and without prior notice where any circumstance in 18.2 applies, where required by law, or where the Service is discontinued under the exception in 16.4. An ordinary general discontinuation carries the notice 16.4 promises.
18.5 Effect. On termination your license under section 9 ends and you must stop calling the API. You may retain and continue to use Output already delivered to you, including cached copies, and figures derived from it, for records, for proposals already issued, and for the customers you issued them to — subject to sections 9.3, 13 and 14, which continue to apply to that Output.
18.6 Survival. Sections 1, 5, 6, 7, 9.3, 9.5, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 18 through 26 survive termination, along with any other provision that by its nature should.
19.1 THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE". The Service, the Tariff Data and the Output are provided without warranty of any kind, express, implied or statutory, to the fullest extent permitted by law. RATEGRID DISCLAIMS ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, ACCURACY, QUIET ENJOYMENT, TITLE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT.
19.2 Without limiting 19.1, RateGrid does not warrant that any figure is accurate, complete, current or fit for any purpose; that the Tariff Data corresponds to any utility's currently applicable tariff; that the Service will be uninterrupted, secure or error-free; that defects will be corrected; or that any result will meet your requirements.
19.3 Utilities publish inconsistent, superseded and occasionally erroneous documents. Some such inconsistencies are documented in the data itself. That documentation is a disclosure, not a warranty that the rest is free of them.
19.4 No advice or information obtained from RateGrid, whether oral or written, creates any warranty. Nothing in this section limits RateGrid's express commitments in 11.2, 11.3 and 11.5, which are undertakings about its own conduct rather than warranties about the Output.
19.5 Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties. Where that is so, the exclusions above apply to the fullest extent permitted, and nothing here affects rights that cannot lawfully be excluded.
20.1 No indirect damages. To the fullest extent permitted by law, and subject to 20.4, RateGrid is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, exemplary, punitive or consequential damages, nor for lost profits, lost revenue, lost business, lost or corrupted data, cost of substitute services, or damage to reputation — including losses arising from reliance on any estimate, from a decision to install or not install equipment, from a rate-plan election, or from any figure the Service produced — whether or not RateGrid was advised of the possibility.
20.2 CAP. RATEGRID'S TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY IS LIMITED. To the fullest extent permitted by law, and subject to 20.4, RateGrid's total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to the Service and these Terms is limited to the greater of:
(a) the fees you paid RateGrid for the Service in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim; and
(b) one hundred United States dollars ($100).
20.2.1 The Service is free of charge today, so for most customers this cap is $100. An order form under 1.3 may supersede this section for the customer that signs it.
20.3 Application. The cap applies in aggregate across all claims, on any theory — contract, tort, negligence, strict liability, statute or otherwise. It applies to claims relating to unauthorized access to or loss of data, to inability to use the Service, and to third-party claims routed through you. Where an account has moved between tiers, 20.2 is applied to the amounts actually paid.
20.4 Exceptions. Nothing in this section limits or excludes RateGrid's liability for gross negligence, willful misconduct, fraud or intentional misrepresentation, or any liability that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded.
20.5 One direction. Sections 20.1 to 20.4 limit RateGrid's liability only. They do not limit your obligations under section 21, or your liability for a material or willful breach of sections 7, 9 or 11.4.
20.6 Basis of the bargain. The Service is provided free of charge, and these limits reflect that allocation of risk. Without them the Service would not be provided.
21.1 You will defend, indemnify and hold harmless RateGrid, and its owner, members, officers and contractors, from and against any third-party claim, demand, proceeding, loss, liability, damage, penalty, cost and reasonable legal fee arising out of or relating to:
(a) your use of the Service, including any use made with your API key;
(b) your breach of these Terms, of section 7, or of any representation you make in section 11.4;
(c) your Customer Inputs, including a claim that collecting, using or sending them infringed a right or breached a law;
(d) your application, your materials, and the claims you make to your own customers — including any claim about savings, payback, bill outcomes or program eligibility;
(e) a claim brought by your customer or end user arising from your presentation, modification, interpretation or use of Output, including any representation you made about it; or
(f) your violation of any law or of the rights of any third party.
21.2 Procedure. RateGrid will notify you promptly of any claim for which it seeks indemnity, will give you sole control of the defense and settlement of that claim subject to this section, and will provide reasonable cooperation at your expense. A delay in notifying you relieves you of your obligations to the extent the delay prejudices the defense. RateGrid may participate in the defense with its own counsel at its own expense. You may not settle a claim in a way that imposes a non-monetary obligation, an admission of fault, or an unindemnified payment on RateGrid without its written consent, which will not be unreasonably withheld.
21.3 Limit. Your obligations under this section apply only to third-party claims, and do not extend to any claim to the extent it arises from RateGrid's own gross negligence, willful misconduct, or breach of these Terms.
22.1 Governing law. These Terms and any dispute arising out of them or the Service are governed by the laws of the State of Wisconsin, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. The U.N. Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.
22.2 Venue. The state courts located in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, and the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin — the federal district in which Waukesha County lies — have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising out of these Terms or the Service. You consent to personal jurisdiction and venue in those courts, and waive any objection based on inconvenient forum.
22.3 Jury trial waiver. Each party waives any right to a jury trial in any proceeding arising out of these Terms or the Service. Where the law of the forum does not permit a jury to be waived before a dispute arises — California and Georgia among them — this waiver does not apply, and instead each party consents, to the extent that forum's law allows, to have the dispute tried by a referee or other non-jury procedure that forum makes available. Nothing here purports to waive a right that cannot lawfully be waived.
22.4 No class actions. Claims must be brought in an individual capacity, not as a plaintiff or class member in a purported class, collective, consolidated or representative proceeding.
22.5 Time limit. Any claim arising out of these Terms or the Service must be brought within one year after it arose, or it is permanently barred, except where a longer period cannot lawfully be shortened.
22.6 Injunctive relief. Notwithstanding 22.2, either party may seek injunctive relief in any court of competent jurisdiction to protect its intellectual property or its Confidential Information as defined in section 25.
23.1 RateGrid may update these Terms. The current version identifier and hash are always available at GET /terms/version and at the top of the published page.
23.2 Material changes. For a change that materially reduces your rights or materially increases your obligations — including a reduction of the free-tier allowance, a removal of an endpoint you rely on, a narrowing of the license in section 9, or a change to sections 20, 21 or 22 — RateGrid will give at least 30 days' notice before it takes effect, by:
(a) email to the verified address on every active account; and
(b) a notice on the website, and in the change log.
23.3 Urgent changes. A change reasonably necessary to address a security incident, an unlawful use, or a defect producing incorrect figures takes effect immediately, with notice given as soon as practicable afterwards.
23.4 Legally required changes. A change required for RateGrid to comply with law, regulation or a binding order takes effect on the date compliance requires, with as much notice as that date allows. Where such a change would also be material under 23.2, RateGrid will identify it as such and give the fullest notice the deadline permits.
23.5 Other changes. Everything else that is not material — clarifications, typographical corrections, new endpoints, expanded coverage, added fields — takes effect when published.
23.6 Your options. Continued use after a change takes effect is acceptance. If you do not accept a material change, stop using the Service and revoke your key before the effective date; that is your remedy.
23.7 Breaking API changes. RateGrid will give at least 30 days' notice by email and in the Documentation before removing an endpoint or field or changing the meaning of one, except for changes required urgently for security, legality or correctness — including withdrawing a figure discovered to be wrong, which may happen immediately.
24.1 Assignment. You may not assign these Terms without RateGrid's written consent, except to a successor to all or substantially all of your business that is not a competitor of RateGrid. RateGrid may assign these Terms to an affiliate or to a successor in a merger, acquisition, reorganization or sale of assets. Any other attempted assignment is void.
24.2 Notices. Notices to RateGrid go to support@rategrid.dev. Notices to you go to the email address on your account, and are treated as received when sent. Keeping that address current is your responsibility.
24.3 Severability. If a provision is held unenforceable, it is modified to the minimum extent necessary to make it enforceable, or severed if it cannot be; the rest remains in force.
24.4 No waiver. A failure or delay in enforcing a provision is not a waiver of it. A waiver is effective only in writing and only for the instance given.
24.5 Entire agreement. These Terms, the privacy notice, any applicable order form, and the Documentation expressly identified as contractual are the entire agreement about the Service, and supersede all prior discussions, marketing statements and understandings. Neither party relies on any representation not set out in those documents, and nothing here excludes liability for fraudulent misrepresentation.
24.6 Informational materials. The status page, the rates pages, the change log and other informational materials describe current Service behavior, coverage and verification status. They are published so that those facts can be checked rather than taken on trust, and they are accurate to the best of RateGrid's knowledge — but they do not create warranties and do not modify these Terms unless expressly incorporated by reference.
24.7 No third-party beneficiaries. These Terms create no rights in anyone who is not a party, including your customers and end users.
24.8 Relationship. The parties are independent contractors. Nothing creates a partnership, joint venture, agency, franchise or employment relationship.
24.9 Force majeure. RateGrid is not liable for any failure or delay caused by events beyond its reasonable control, including: acts of God, fire, flood, earthquake and severe weather; war, terrorism and civil unrest; labour disputes; epidemic; failures of power, internet, DNS, hosting or cloud providers; denial-of-service and other attacks; government or regulatory action; and the failure, withdrawal, unavailability or change of any third-party data source, utility publication or regulator system. Obligations affected are suspended for the duration.
24.10 Construction. Headings are for convenience. "Including" means "including without limitation". These Terms will not be construed against the drafter.
24.11 Export and sanctions. You will comply with U.S. export control and sanctions laws and will not make the Service available to a restricted party.
24.12 Identifying you as a customer. RateGrid may state that you are a customer, and use your name and logo for that purpose, on its website and in materials describing who uses the Service. That is the whole of the permission: it does not extend to describing what you built, quoting you, implying that you endorse RateGrid, or naming you in a press release or a funding announcement, each of which needs your written agreement first. Use will follow any brand guidelines you provide. You may withdraw this permission at any time by emailing support@rategrid.dev, and RateGrid will stop within 30 days and remove the reference at the next update of the material in question. Withdrawing costs you nothing and does not affect your account.
24.13 Identifying RateGrid. You may state that your product uses RateGrid, and use the RateGrid name for that purpose, provided you do not imply that RateGrid endorses or has verified your product, and you comply with sections 13 and 14. Section 9.3 continues to govern what you may do with the Tariff Data and Output themselves.
25.1 Confidential Information. "Confidential Information" means non-public information one party discloses to the other in connection with the Service that is identified as confidential or that a reasonable person would understand to be confidential from its nature or the circumstances of disclosure. Your API key, your Customer Inputs and your unreleased product plans are yours. RateGrid's unpublished encoding methods, verification tooling and unreleased datasets are RateGrid's.
25.2 Obligations. Each party will use the other's Confidential Information only to perform under these Terms, will protect it with at least the care it uses for its own confidential information and no less than reasonable care, and will not disclose it except to those of its personnel and contractors who need it and are bound to equivalent obligations.
25.3 Exclusions. These obligations do not apply to information that is or becomes public without breach, was already known to the recipient without a duty of confidence, is independently developed without use of the other's Confidential Information, or is lawfully received from a third party free to disclose it. A party may disclose Confidential Information where a law or valid legal order compels it, giving the other party such notice as the law permits so it can seek protection.
25.4 Security measures. RateGrid applies safeguards appropriate to a service of this size and to the data it holds. Traffic is served over TLS. API keys are stored as a hash and a short prefix, never in full. Request and response bodies are not logged. Access to production data is restricted on a least-privilege basis to those who require it to operate the Service. This subsection describes the measures RateGrid maintains; it is not a warranty, and section 19 continues to apply to the Service itself.
25.5 Breach notification. If RateGrid determines that a security incident has resulted in the unauthorized acquisition of personal information it holds about you or contained in your Customer Inputs, it will notify you without undue delay and in any event within 72 hours of that determination, by email to the address on your account. The notice will describe what is known, what is affected, and what is being done. RateGrid will not delay notice in order to complete its investigation, and will follow up as more becomes known. This is in addition to, and does not narrow, any statutory notification duty.
25.6 Survival. 25.1 to 25.3 survive termination for three years, except for Confidential Information that is a trade secret, as to which they survive for as long as it remains one.
Questions about these Terms, privacy requests, security reports and legal notices: support@rategrid.dev.
A.1 This is the wording section 14.3 requires wherever a figure derived from Output is shown to a consumer. It is short on purpose: a disclosure a reader skips protects nobody, and length is the usual way of making one skippable.
Estimate only — not a bill or a quote. This figure is an estimate of what electricity would cost under a published utility rate. It is not a bill, not a quote, and not approved by your utility or any regulator. Your actual bill will differ, and depends on your real metered usage, when you use electricity, your billing cycle, taxes and fees, and any program you are enrolled in. Rates change, and can change after this estimate was produced. No saving, payback period or bill outcome is guaranteed.
A.2 The elements that must survive any rewording: that the figure is an estimate; that it is not a bill, a quote, or utility- or regulator-approved; that the actual bill will differ and what it depends on; that rates change; and that no saving or payback is guaranteed.
A.3 Where the response carried a warning, a reduced confidence value or an unverified status, 14.3.1 also applies and the disclosure field returned with that response gives the additional wording.
A.4 What is collected and why is set out in the privacy notice.