API TERMS. PLAY FAIR. BUILD LOUD.
Tiers, pricing, quotas, and the rules of the road for building on the MTCSTW API. Binding on every key — free or paid.
KARL: “The data is a weapon. We’re happy to hand it to you — as long as you don’t point it at regular people.”
THE DEAL
These API Terms (“API Terms”) govern your use of the MTCSTW API operated by The Propaganda Factory (“we,” “us”). They ride on top of the Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy — by requesting an API key, you agree to all three. If you don’t agree, don’t use the API.
Effective date: October 2026. This is not legal advice — it’s a plain-language summary of a binding agreement. Read it like it counts, because it does.
TIERS & PRICING
Every pack is a subscription, billed through Stripe — monthly or annual (annual saves 15%). A single key can hold multiple packs. Bundles (Pick 2 / Pick 3) grant any 2 or 3 packs at $15 off individual pricing. Current tiers:
- Free — $0: 1,000 calls/month across all data packs (sample data). Attribution required — credit MTCSTW visibly wherever the data appears.
- Politics Pack — $69/mo or $703/yr: 50,000 calls/month. Campaign finance, lobbying, corporate data.
- Corporate Pack — $69/mo or $703/yr: 50,000 calls/month. Violations, OSHA, wage theft, Ghoul scores + brands.
- Private Equity Pack — $99/mo or $1,010/yr: 50,000 calls/month. Firms, portfolios, impacts, bankruptcy tracking.
- Health Pack — $69/mo or $703/yr: 50,000 calls/month. Health-sector corporate data.
- Patent Pack — $69/mo or $703/yr: 50,000 calls/month. Patent hoarders, evergreening, troll profiles.
- Pick 2 Bundle — $123/mo or $1,255/yr ($153/mo or $1,561/yr with Private Equity Pack): any 2 packs, $15 off.
- Pick 3 Bundle — $192/mo or $1,958/yr ($222/mo or $2,264/yr with Private Equity Pack): any 3 packs, $15 off.
- All Access — $349/mo or $3,560/yr: 500,000 calls/month. Every data pack, plus webhooks and bulk downloads. Priority support.
- Enterprise — $1,499/mo or $15,290/yr: unlimited calls, custom SLAs, dedicated support channel.
All paid packs include AI-detected connections. Prices are in USD and may change with 30 days’ notice — your current billing period always finishes at the price you paid.
QUOTAS & OVERAGE
Quotas are per calendar month and per pack. When you exceed your quota, the API returns HTTP 402 (Payment Required) until you upgrade your pack or the month resets. We don’t silently bill overage — you stay dark until you make a move.
Rate limits apply per key on top of monthly quotas. Abusing rate limits (bursting, rotating throwaway keys to dodge quotas, sharing keys across unrelated parties) is a Terms violation — see Termination.
ATTRIBUTION RULES
- Free tier: visible attribution is mandatory — “Data via MTCSTW” with a link to mtcstw.com/api, wherever our data is displayed or published.
- Paid tiers: attribution is appreciated but not required. (Keep it anyway. Solidarity.)
- Don’t imply we endorse your product. Don’t strip attribution that was required when you were free.
WHAT’S PROHIBITED
Your keys die and your access ends if you:
- Resell raw bulk data as a competing API — building a product on our data is fine; white-labeling our datasets into a competing data API is not.
- Use the data for FCRA-prohibited purposes — no credit, employment, housing, or insurance eligibility decisions. Tenant screening, hiring screens, lending models, underwriting: hard no.
- Attempt to re-identify anonymized individuals — donor identities are withheld from our datasets (see Terms, campaign-finance section). Cross-referencing or de-anonymizing is an instant, permanent ban.
- Violate source terms of service — if you combine our data with other sources, you’re responsible for complying with those sources’ terms too. Don’t drag us into your ToS violations.
- Scrape endpoints at abusive volume, share or sell keys, or probe private/internal endpoints.
DATA REALITY
Our datasets are aggregated from public sources (FEC filings, Senate lobbying records, OSHA data, and more) plus crowdsourced movement data. They’re powerful and they’re honest — but no dataset is complete or error-free. Verify before you publish or act on what you pull. What you build with the data is your responsibility.
SLA & AS-IS
Enterprise tier: comes with a service-level commitment — uptime targets and a support channel, defined in your Enterprise agreement. Every other tier: the API is provided “as-is” without warranties of any kind. We aim for high availability and we’ll tell you about scheduled maintenance, but we don’t owe uptime guarantees on non-Enterprise tiers. To the maximum extent permitted by law, our liability is limited to the fees you paid in the current billing period.
KEYS & SECURITY
- Keep your keys secret. Treat a key like a password — don’t commit it to public repos, don’t embed it in client-side code, don’t share it.
- You’re responsible for traffic under your key. Rotate immediately if it leaks — you can rotate from your dashboard without contacting us.
- We may rotate or revoke keys we believe are compromised, no warning needed.
TERMINATION
You can cancel anytime — paid packs run to the end of the billing period, then stop; your keys go dark with them. We can suspend or terminate your API access, with or without warning depending on severity, for: prohibited uses (resale, FCRA uses, re-identification attempts), quota fraud, security violations, or any breach of these API Terms or the main Terms of Service. No refunds for terminated-for-cause accounts.
CHANGES
We may update these API Terms. Material changes get posted here with a new effective date and flagged in the feed. Continued use after changes means you accept the updated terms. Questions: mtcstw@gmail.com.
Last updated: October 2026.