Usage Policy

Which terms apply to you

Sandbox use is governed by the Sandbox Terms, which you accept in the Developer Portal when you create your first test key.

Live use is governed by an API Commercial Agreement signed between Price Hero and each client. That agreement is not published and is not a click-through: it is negotiated individually, and its terms control where they differ from this policy. To begin, submit an access request from the Developer Portal or email mailys@pricehero.ai.

This policy applies to sandbox use, and to live use except where your API Commercial Agreement says otherwise. Read it alongside how pricing may be used.

Rate limits

The API enforces rate limits to ensure fair access and system stability. Limits are applied per key across:

• Requests per second
• Requests per minute / hour
• Concurrent requests

If you exceed a rate limit you'll receive a 429 Too Many Requests response. Back off and retry using exponential backoff (see Errors).

Rate limits may vary by endpoint and may be adjusted at any time. Price Hero reserves the right to throttle, restrict, or suspend access for usage patterns inconsistent with normal application behavior, including excessive or structured queries that suggest data extraction or scraping.

Storing and caching API output

Reference identifiers

Catalog item IDs, brand IDs, and category IDs may be stored persistently, solely for the purpose of re-querying the API.

Pricing

A price returned by the API may be rendered into an output your product produces — an offer shown to a customer, a published listing, a certificate, a record of a decision that has been made — and that output may persist for as long as your business requires it.

A rendered output is written once and not updated. If a stored value is refreshed, recalculated, or read back as a current valuation, it is not a rendered output — it is retained pricing data.

A price may not be retained as a Price Hero estimate: a stored field, keyed to an item, that can be read back later as the value our API returned. This applies whatever the field is called — valuation, estimate, suggested price — and whether it is written once or refreshed over time.

The distinction is attribution, not the number. Once a person commits a price as their own asking price, offer, or listing price, that number is their commercial decision and you may store and use it without restriction. What may not accumulate in your systems is a record of what Price Hero said.

A value computed from our price by a fixed or recoverable transform — a percentage, a margin, a band — is treated as our output for the purposes of this section. Applying a multiplier does not make a retained value your own.

A retained price-derived value must correspond to a specific commercial event: an offer made to an identified customer, a listing published, a purchase, or a document issued. Automation is permitted — an offer may be computed and stored with no human involvement. What may not exist is a stored value for an item where no such event occurred.

Two practical tests:

• If you can query your own data to answer "what did Price Hero value this kind of item at, over this period?" — you are retaining pricing data.
• If a feature can detect that a price has changed — an alert, a movement indicator, a percentage since last week — it requires a stored prior value, and that value is retained pricing data. Features that only display a price need no stored state; features that notice a price do.

Drafts and working state

An object your users create and reopen — a listing draft, a saved basket, a work-in-progress record — is stored state, not a rendered output. Where a price appears in one, fetch it when the draft is opened rather than writing it onto the draft. Once the listing is published or the offer is sent, the committed price is your user's own and may persist with it.

Historical estimates

Where the API returns historical estimate or pricing files, they may be fetched and displayed — a chart in a listing flow, a range shown alongside a recommendation. The file and its contents may not be stored, re-served, or accumulated after the response is rendered. A link's expiry does not by itself satisfy this: a downloaded copy is retained data whether or not the link still works.

Prices on durable documents

Where a price is rendered onto something that outlives the request and the sale — a certificate, an appraisal, a report — the following apply, and the use requires a signed agreement covering it:

• The value carries a visible as-of date
• It is described as an estimated resale value, not a formal appraisal
• Attribution to Price Hero is granted in writing, not assumed

Caching

The caching rule governs the API response. It does not limit how long a rendered output may live — a published listing or an issued certificate persists on its own terms.

Temporary performance caching of a response is permitted: at the request level, or for short-term reuse within a session. Cached responses may not be retained more than 24 hours from retrieval, and caching may not be used to reduce or eliminate reliance on the API over time.

Not permitted at any duration

• Product data retained as a catalog — variant-level or attribute-level records assembled into your own copy of ours. Rendering product details into a listing or an offer is permitted; keeping them as a catalog is not.
• Bulk API responses or offline datasets derived from API output
• Stored archives of pricing or catalog data, including retained copies of historical estimate files

Access requiring a signed agreement

Self-serve access covers your own application, your own brand, your own users. The following are not available on self-serve terms and are scoped individually:

• Valuation offered as a primary product feature, including consumer-facing valuation
• White-label, co-branded, or reseller distribution
• Prices rendered onto certificates or other durable documents
• Publishing prices — media, marketing, SEO, or published reports
• Bulk datasets, data feeds, or historical series
• Platform integrations that redistribute pricing to a large downstream population of sellers or merchants

Prohibited usage

API access is granted for use within permitted workflows only. The following are not allowed:

• Sharing API credentials with third parties, or allowing third-party direct access to the API through your key
• Operating the API as a proxy, service bureau, or resold service. Building an application that serves your own end users is permitted and is not covered by this restriction
• Embedding keys in client-side or publicly accessible code
• Using automated methods to extract data at scale outside normal application workflows
• Attempting to bypass rate limits or usage controls
• Using the API, or output derived from it, to build, train, benchmark, or seed a valuation, catalog, or pricing service that competes with Price Hero
• Publishing comparisons of Price Hero output against another provider's

Price Hero may suspend or terminate access immediately for violations.