Terms of Service

These terms govern your use of 1stAuthor — the website at 1stauthor.com, the API at api.1stauthor.com, the MCP server and the SDKs (together, the “Service”), operated by the 1stAuthor team (“we”). By creating an account or calling the API you agree to them.

1. The Service

1stAuthor gives software agents and their developers programmatic access to primary sources — scientific papers, statutes, court judgments, researcher profiles and web pages — through search, layered reading and agentic question answering. Each domain lists its own corpus, coverage and status at GET /v1/domains. Domains marked building or planned are previews and may change before launch.

2. Accounts and API keys

• You need an account to make paid requests. Sign in with Google or with a code sent to your email; the account is created on first sign-in and is tied to that email address.
• API keys are personal to your account. Keep them secret. Requests made with your keys are your requests, whoever made them. Revoke any key you no longer control.
• One person, one account. Do not create accounts to multiply free allowances; we may merge or close such accounts.
• You must be able to form a binding contract where you live to use the Service.

3. Acceptable use

Use the Service to build things. Do not:

• attempt to download, mirror or reconstruct a substantial part of any corpus, or resell raw access to it;
• circumvent rate limits, credit accounting, key scopes or other technical controls;
• use the Service to break the law, to infringe others’ rights, or to build something whose purpose is to harm people;
• probe, scan or test the Service’s security without written permission.

Retrieved text remains subject to the terms of its original source (arXiv, PubMed Central, the courts and legislatures that published it, the web pages that were cached). We give you access; we do not grant rights the source does not.

4. Credits, plans and payment

• Usage is metered in credits. Prices per operation and per plan are listed on the pricing page and in GET /v1/billing/plans; they may change with notice on that page. 1 credit = US$0.001.
• The monthly allowance of a plan resets on each billing cycle and does not roll over. Purchased credits do not expire while your account exists and are spent after the allowance.
• A request that fails on our side or upstream is refunded automatically; a document that does not exist (404) is never charged. Otherwise credits are consumed when a request is served and are not refundable, except where the law requires it.
• Payments are processed by Stripe. Subscriptions renew automatically until cancelled from the billing portal; cancelling stops the next renewal and keeps the current period.
• Free allowances are a courtesy and may be adjusted.

5. What the answers are — and are not

Agentic answers are generated by language models from retrieved sources. We work hard so that every citation resolves to a real document and that truncation and coverage gaps are flagged, but answers can be wrong, incomplete or out of date. Nothing returned by the Service is legal, medical, financial or professional advice. The Law domain in particular is a research tool for professionals and their agents, not a substitute for a lawyer; coverage notices in each response describe what the index does and does not contain.

6. Availability and changes

We aim for high availability and publish live status at /status, but the Service is provided “as is”, without a guaranteed uptime, and depends on upstream providers we do not control. We may change or retire endpoints; the versioned API (/v1) and the changelog are how we announce that, and we keep legacy paths working for as long as we reasonably can.

7. Your data and content

You keep all rights to the queries you send and the outputs you build. We use request metadata for billing, abuse prevention and improving the Service as described in the Privacy Policy. If you contribute a corpus (“bring your own data”), the terms for it are agreed separately in writing.

8. Termination

You can delete your account at any time from Settings; this removes your keys and wallet (cancel any subscription first). We may suspend or close accounts that break these terms, that we reasonably believe are compromised, or that have been inactive for a very long time, and will tell you why when we can.

9. Liability

To the extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect or consequential losses, lost profits or lost data arising from the Service, and our total liability for any claim is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim. Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law.

10. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. Material changes are announced on this page with a new date and, for account holders, by email. Continuing to use the Service after a change means you accept it.

11. Contact

Questions about these terms: tommy@chien.io.