What we shipped this month: geocoding, IP, time zone and more
A roundup of recent work across the API: new compatibility hosts, faster time zone and elevation lookups, dashboard features, and clearer quota visibility.
Updated terms of service and privacy policy
Legal documents are easy to write once and forget, even as the product underneath them keeps changing. Ours needed a proper update, and both our terms of service and our privacy policy have now been revised to reflect the platform as it actually works today, rather than an earlier version of it.
The most significant addition covers our seventeen compatibility hosts directly. Each one reproduces another provider's request and response shape exactly, and our updated terms are explicit about what that does and does not mean: the shape is matched precisely, while copyright, terms and privacy text on those hosts is ours, not the original provider's. Anyone relying on a compatibility host as part of their own product should read this section specifically, since it clarifies exactly where our responsibility as the operator of that host begins and ends.
The privacy policy update reflects how account data, usage data and payment information move through the platform, covering the dashboard's usage stats, invoices, API keys, referral program, and the three payment methods we support: PayPal, cryptocurrency, and bank transfer. It also addresses IP address handling directly, since IP geolocation is one of our core endpoints and a meaningful part of how quota is calculated per network in the first place.
We wrote both documents in plain language wherever the underlying legal requirement allowed it, on the theory that a policy nobody reads carefully is not doing its job. Where technical precision was required, particularly around data handling and account security, we kept that precision rather than smoothing it over for readability alone.
For teams that need a formal record of how personal data is processed on our end, a data processing agreement is available on request, separate from the general privacy policy, and covered in more detail elsewhere. That option exists specifically for organizations with their own compliance requirements around vendor data handling, on top of the general policy that applies to every account.
Neither update changes pricing, quota behavior, or how any endpoint or compatibility host functions. They exist to describe the platform accurately as it stands today, not to introduce new restrictions or new obligations beyond what was already true in practice. Both documents are linked from the footer of every page on the site, and we would encourage anyone building on the compatibility hosts specifically to give that section a read.