AnswerPool — Terms of Service
1. Who you are contracting with
AnswerPool is operated by AutoCortex LLC, a Texas limited liability company ("AnswerPool", "we", "us"). You can reach us at support@answerpool.io. These Terms govern your use of the AnswerPool website, HTTP API, MCP server and every response we return (together, the "Service").
2. Agreement
By calling any AnswerPool endpoint or tool — free or paid — by buying credits, or by otherwise using the Service, you agree to these Terms. If you are using the Service for an organization, you confirm you may bind it. If you do not agree, do not call the Service. Automated clients act for the person or organization that operates them, and that person or organization is bound by these Terms.
3. Eligibility
You must be at least 18 years old and legally able to enter a contract. The Service is not offered to children and is not directed at anyone under 18. We do not knowingly provide the Service to children.
4. What the Service is
We compute answers from public data sources — U.S. federal public-domain datasets (including SEC EDGAR, the Federal Register, USAspending, NIH RePORTER, openFDA, CISA KEV, NVD, the National Weather Service and ClinicalTrials.gov) and CC0 datasets (including OpenAlex) — and return them as machine-readable JSON with provenance. Our answers are derived works: they are computed, ranked, scored, aggregated and labeled by us. They are not the underlying government records, and they are not official government products.
5. Not advice
Outputs are informational analytical signals only.
(a) Not investment advice. Nothing we return is investment, financial, securities, accounting or tax advice, a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security, or an offer or solicitation. We are not a broker-dealer, investment adviser, or municipal advisor.
(b) Not legal advice. Regulatory, rulemaking and compliance outputs are summaries and derived signals. They are not legal advice and do not create an attorney-client relationship. Always read the official text in the Federal Register or the eCFR before acting.
(c) Not medical advice. Drug, device, food, adverse-event and clinical-trial outputs are not medical advice, diagnosis or treatment, and must not be used to make decisions about medical care. Adverse-event reports are voluntary, unverified and subject to reporting bias: a count of reports is not an incidence rate and does not establish that a product caused an outcome. Clinical-trial records reflect what a sponsor registered, not verified outcomes.
(d) Not safety-critical information. Weather outputs are derived counts and aggregates, not official National Weather Service products. For any life-safety decision use the live NWS product at weather.gov.
(e) Not security advice. Vulnerability outputs describe published catalog entries; they do not tell you whether you are exposed.
6. No affiliation or endorsement
AnswerPool is independent. We are not affiliated with, sponsored by, endorsed by, or in any way officially connected with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the National Library of Medicine, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, NOAA or the National Weather Service, CISA, NIST, any other government agency, or OpenAlex. Agency names and dataset names are used only to identify the public sources of the data we compute from. We claim no ownership of those underlying public records and use no agency marks or logos.
7. Accuracy, completeness and timeliness
We compute faithfully from the sources each response names, but we do not warrant that any
output is accurate, complete, current or fit for any purpose. Upstream sources contain errors,
revisions and lags; our retrieval and indexing add further lag. Every response carries the
retrieval time and a refresh_after time — use them. Where a source requires it we
pass its own caveat through; for example, BLS.gov cannot vouch for data or analyses derived
from BLS data after retrieval, and openFDA results should be assumed unvalidated.
8. Forecasts and model-derived outputs
(a) Forecasts are probabilistic. Some outputs are predictions, flags or scores about future or uncertain events. They are estimates with error, not statements of fact or promises of outcomes. We publish our own forecast track record at /v1/evals; a past score is not a guarantee of future accuracy.
(b) AI-generated content. At least one product is scored by a large language model
over retrieved evidence, and is labeled as such in its response (method_id,
provenance and a disclaimer field). Model-derived outputs can be wrong, incomplete or
misleading in ways that deterministic computation is not. Do not rely on them without
independent verification.
9. Payment
(a) Prices and currency. All prices are in U.S. dollars, are shown per call before you pay (in the 402 response, the catalog and the OpenAPI document), and may change; the price shown when you call is the price you pay for that call.
(b) Prepaid credits (card). Credit packs are bought through Stripe and issue a single API key, shown once. Credits are prepaid, non-transferable, redeemable only for AnswerPool calls, and not redeemable for cash. Credits do not expire.
(c) x402 / USDC. Payments made with USDC on Base settle on a public blockchain through a third-party facilitator directly to our wallet. Blockchain payments are final and irreversible. There are no chargebacks, reversals or disputes on an x402 payment, and we cannot refund one. You are responsible for sending the correct amount on the correct network from a wallet you control.
(d) Failed calls are never charged. If a request fails (any 4xx or 5xx response), an x402 payment is not settled and a credit debit is automatically refunded to your key. If you believe you were charged for a failed call, email support@answerpool.io.
(e) Refunds. Unused prepaid credits are refundable on request at any time. Email support@answerpool.io with your credit key id and we will refund the unused balance on that key to the original payment method and close the key. Completed paid calls are not refundable — once we have computed and returned an answer, that call is final. Payments made in USDC through x402 are final and irreversible and cannot be refunded by us; see (c).
(f) We are not a money services business. We accept payment for our own service. We do not hold, custody, exchange or transmit funds for you or anyone else, and credits are a prepaid balance for our service only.
(g) Taxes. Prices exclude taxes. You are responsible for any sales, use, VAT, GST, withholding or similar taxes arising from your purchase, other than taxes on our income.
10. Acceptable use
You may: call the Service from software, store and use the outputs, and build products and services on top of them, including products that pass per-call access through to your own users. To be explicit about what that does not mean: wrapping, bundling or reselling per-call access to our endpoints through your own product, agent or platform is permitted — that is what the API is for.
You may not: (a) attempt to obtain our non-public internals, including prompts, thresholds, costs, margins or unpublished methods; (b) republish or resell our stored responses wholesale as a competing dataset or a substitute feed; (c) circumvent payment, rate limits, credit accounting or access controls, or share a credit key in a way designed to do so; (d) attack, overload, probe or disrupt the Service or its infrastructure; (e) use the Service to violate any law, including sanctions and export laws; or (f) misrepresent our derived outputs as official government records or as endorsed by any agency. Rate limits apply to free calls and may change without notice.
11. Sanctions and export
You represent that you are not located in, organized under the laws of, or ordinarily resident in a country or territory subject to comprehensive U.S. sanctions, and that you are not a person subject to U.S. sanctions, including any person on the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons list or any equivalent list. You will not use the Service in violation of U.S. export control or sanctions laws, and you will not make the Service available to any such person or jurisdiction. We may block access to comply with these laws.
12. Intellectual property and your rights in outputs
The underlying public records are in the public domain or dedicated under CC0; we claim no rights in them. We own the Service, its software, its methods and its compilations. Subject to these Terms and to payment, we grant you a worldwide, non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable license to use, store, modify and distribute the outputs we return to you, including in your own commercial products. Attribution to AnswerPool is appreciated and not required. Section 10(b) still applies: the license is to use the outputs you obtain, not to mirror our corpus as a competing feed.
13. Sources and attribution
Each response names its sources and their rights class. Some sources ask that their name travel with the data; where they do, we carry that attribution and their own caveats in the response, and you should keep them when you redistribute an output. The current source list and rights classes are published at https://answerpool.io/llms.txt.
14. Copyright complaints
The Service returns outputs computed from U.S. federal public-domain and CC0 sources and hosts no user-submitted content, so we do not maintain a registered DMCA agent. If you nonetheless believe something we publish infringes your rights, email support@answerpool.io with the details and we will investigate promptly.
15. Warranty disclaimer
THE SERVICE AND ALL OUTPUTS ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW WE DISCLAIM ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, ACCURACY AND QUIET ENJOYMENT. WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, ERROR-FREE, OR THAT ANY OUTPUT IS CORRECT OR COMPLETE. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain disclaimers, so some of this may not apply to you.
16. Limitation of liability
TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, WE WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR ANY LOST PROFITS, LOST REVENUE, LOST DATA, TRADING OR INVESTMENT LOSSES, REGULATORY PENALTIES, OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY. OUR TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY FOR ALL CLAIMS ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THE SERVICE IN ANY TWELVE-MONTH PERIOD WILL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF (a) THE AMOUNTS YOU PAID US FOR THE SERVICE IN THAT PERIOD AND (b) ONE HUNDRED U.S. DOLLARS ($100). These limits apply regardless of the theory of liability and even if a limited remedy fails of its essential purpose. Some jurisdictions do not allow these limits, so they may not fully apply to you.
17. Indemnification
You will defend, indemnify and hold harmless AutoCortex LLC and its members, officers and agents from any third-party claim, loss, liability, damage, cost or expense (including reasonable attorneys' fees) arising out of (a) your use of the Service or of any output, (b) your breach of these Terms, (c) your violation of any law or third-party right, or (d) any decision you or your users make in reliance on an output.
18. Suspension and termination
We may suspend or terminate access, revoke a credit key, or stop offering the Service, at any time, with or without notice, including for suspected abuse, non-payment, circumvention, legal risk, or sanctions compliance. If we terminate your access without cause, we will refund the unused credit balance on your key. If we terminate for your breach, we may retain it. You may stop using the Service at any time. Sections 5–9, 12, 15, 16, 17 and 20 survive.
19. Changes
We may change these Terms. Material changes take effect 14 days after we post the updated version at this URL and update the effective date and version above. Continued use after that date is acceptance. The version at this URL governs; prior versions are available on request.
20. Governing law and disputes
These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Texas, excluding its conflict-of-laws rules and the U.N. Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. The exclusive venue for any dispute is the state and federal courts located in Texas, and both parties consent to personal jurisdiction there. Each party waives any right to a jury trial to the extent permitted by law. Any claim must be brought within one year after it arises.
21. General
The Service is operated from the United States and offered on a business-to-business basis to developers and software agents; we make no representation that it is appropriate or available elsewhere, and you are responsible for compliance with your local law. These Terms are the entire agreement between us about the Service and supersede prior discussions. If a provision is unenforceable, the rest remains in effect and the provision is enforced to the maximum extent permitted. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver. You may not assign these Terms without our consent; we may assign them to a successor. Nothing creates a partnership, agency or employment relationship. We are not liable for failures caused by events beyond our reasonable control, including upstream source outages, network or blockchain failures, or acts of government.