Terms of service

The short version

Subsido is an information service about public support measures for businesses. It is not advice, and it is not a government service: the competent authority decides who is eligible and who is awarded what, and a match here is never that decision. You may build more or less anything on the API, including commercial products. The measures are published by public authorities under their own licences, and we serve each as far as its licence allows. You may not redistribute the data itself unless your plan includes redistribution rights. There is no uptime guarantee yet. There is no free plan: an account without a subscription, including one whose subscription has ended, keeps its keys, but they answer 402 until a plan is chosen.

The rest of this page is the same thing said carefully. It is not a substitute for an agreement negotiated for a large deployment; if you need one of those, write to hello@subsido.be.

1. What this service is

Subsido reads support measures (grants, premiums, loans, guarantees, tax and social security measures) that Belgian federal, regional and local authorities and the European Union publish, normalises them into one data model, records where each fact came from, keeps the history of every change, evaluates published conditions against facts you give, and provides programmatic access to all of that. It is operated by a company established in Belgium.

Independent service. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by any government or public authority. Eligibility and awards are decided by the competent authority.

2. Information, not advice, not a decision

A match is an indication based on the published conditions and the facts you provide. Only the competent authority decides who qualifies.

Authorities design, publish, revise, suspend and close their measures on their own schedules, and budgets run out. What the API returns is what a source said when we last read it, and every record says when that was and links the authority’s own page. A status, a deadline, an amount, a rule result or an estimate here may be wrong or out of date. Before you or your client act on it (apply, invest, start a project, advise), check it on the official page or with the authority concerned. Nothing here is legal, tax, financial or funding advice, and using the service creates no adviser relationship.

If you show matches to your own clients, show them as what they are: an indication, with the official link, and not a promise that an application will succeed.

3. Accounts and keys

You need an account to hold an API key. Accounts are opened with Google sign-in, and the email address is how you will be told about anything that affects your integration. One account per person or organisation.

Your API keys are yours to look after. A key is shown once, at creation, and only its hash is stored, so it cannot be recovered, only replaced. Traffic authenticated with your key is treated as yours. If a key leaks, revoke it in the dashboard; that takes effect immediately.

Do not create several accounts to get around a plan’s limits. If you need more, ask: it is always less work than a workaround.

4. Plans, payment and cancellation

There is no free plan. An account that has not chosen a plan can open the dashboard and create keys, but those keys answer 402 subscription_required until it subscribes. The plans are Developer, Pro and Business, at €20, €50 and €70 a month, excluding VAT. Billed yearly, a plan costs ten months for twelve (€200, €500 and €700). Payment is in euros through Stripe. Each plan carries the request quota, match evaluations, rate limit and capabilities shown on the pricing page. VAT is added at checkout where it applies. The limits that apply to you are on your dashboard and in the RateLimit-* headers of every keyed response. Enterprise is on request and agreed in writing.

You can cancel at any time from the dashboard. Cancelling stops the next renewal and leaves your plan running until the end of the period you have already paid for. After that the account has no plan, and its keys answer 402 until you subscribe again. Part-periods are not refunded as a rule, but if something went genuinely wrong, write to us and it will be sorted out rather than argued about.

Prices can change. A running subscription keeps billing at the price it was bought at until you change plan; a price change is never applied retroactively.

5. What you may build

Call the API from your own products, cache and store what it returns, combine it with your own data, show it to your users and clients, and charge for the product you build. Keep the attribution a source’s licence asks for wherever you show that source’s text (it is in every record), and keep the link to the official page.

The limits are narrow and specific. You may not:

• Redistribute the data itself to third parties, in bulk or as a feed, a dataset or an API of your own, unless your plan includes redistribution rights (Enterprise, by contract), and even then only as far as each source’s own licence allows.
• Present the data, a match or an estimate as an authority’s decision or statement, or in a way that implies any authority endorses your product.
• Remove or hide the rights mode, attribution or official link where the terms of a source require them.
• Attempt to exceed your plan’s limits by rotating keys, accounts or addresses, or to reach capabilities your plan does not include by any route other than upgrading.
• Use the service to attack, overload or probe the authorities whose publications it reads.

Breaking these is grounds for suspending keys. Where a suspension is not urgent you will be told what the problem is and given a chance to fix it first.

6. Sources keep their own licences

We do not own the publications we read and do not claim to. Each source has a rights mode, decided from its licence and terms of use and recorded with the evidence; every record carries it, and the sources page and GET /v1/sources list it for every source.

• Content from the EU Funding & Tenders Portal is reused under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (CC BY 4.0) of the European Commission, with attribution to the Commission and the shortening marked. Logos and third-party content are excluded.
• Belgian federal open information (FPS Economy, BELSPO, FPS Finance) is reused under the federal reuse terms, worded as Creative Commons Zero (CC0).
• Flemish government information is reused under the right of reuse of article II.55 of the Flemish Bestuursdecreet (the Flemish free reuse regime), with the source named.
• Some sources are served as facts only (dates, amounts, rates, conditions, with our own generated summary and a link), some as a title and a link only, and some not at all until their publisher agrees.

What we license to you is our access service and our data model: the normalisation, the stable identifiers, the generated summaries, the rules, the history and the provenance built on top. If a publisher asks us to stop carrying something, we stop. Treat this as a source that can lose coverage, and do not build something that cannot survive a gap.

7. Company data you send

Facts about companies you send to be matched are used only to answer your request and are not stored, except the companies you put on a watchlist, which are kept until you remove them. You are responsible for having the right to send them. The privacy policy says exactly what is kept.

8. Availability and changes to the API

The service is provided as it is, with no service level agreement and no uptime guarantee. It is monitored and looked after, but if you need a contractual availability commitment, it does not exist yet; ask, and we can talk about what it would take.

Breaking changes go behind a new API version; the current one is /v1 and it will not be broken underneath you. Additive changes (new fields, new endpoints, new values in a list) can happen at any time, so parse defensively and ignore what you do not recognise. Changes are listed in the changelog.

9. Liability

The data is provided without warranty of accuracy, completeness, currency or fitness for a purpose. It is read from publications that contain mistakes and go out of date, and matched by rules that capture only part of what decides eligibility. We are not liable for a missed deadline, a refused application, an award not obtained or repaid, or any decision taken on the strength of the service.

To the extent the law allows, liability for any claim arising from this service is limited to what you paid for it in the twelve months before the claim. Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

10. Ending it

You can stop at any time: cancel the plan, revoke the keys, or ask for the account to be deleted and it will be. We can suspend an account for the reasons in section 5, for non-payment, or if we stop operating the service, in which case you get at least 30 days’ notice by email and a refund of any period paid for but not delivered.

11. Law, languages and changes to these terms

These terms are governed by Belgian law, and the courts of Belgium have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer rather than a business, this does not remove protections that the law of your own country gives you.

These terms exist in Dutch, French and English. The three versions have the same value; in case of doubt, none prevails over the others.

If these terms change materially, the date at the top changes and account holders are emailed before it takes effect. Continuing to use the API after that is acceptance; if you would rather not, cancel and you will be refunded for the unused period.

Questions about any of this go to hello@subsido.be. See also the privacy policy.