Licence · one organisation, internal use, yours to keep

What you may do (Snapshot SKUs)

Apex grants you and your affiliates a non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable, worldwide licence to use the dataset for your organisation's internal business purposes. The licence to the delivered snapshot file is perpetual and irrevocable from the moment of delivery (see Perpetual snapshot). Permitted:

• Load the snapshot into a warehouse, lake, or local database and query it across your organisation.
• Use it through your Authorized Users — employees and contractors acting for your organisation and bound to terms at least as protective as these.
• Integrate Apex values into your internal tools and internal product features.
• Create and publish Derived Results externally (reports, charts, financed-emissions figures) — with attribution and within the limits below.
• Disclose the data and its provenance to your auditors, assurance providers, and financial regulators for regulatory reporting (PCAF, CSRD/ESRS, EBA Pillar 3) and as compelled by law.
• Keep and keep using any delivered snapshot in perpetuity — including if Apex ceases operations.
• Quote an insubstantial amount of individual values (roughly, a handful of data points) in a document without it counting as redistribution.

Snapshot vs Snapshot + API

Both one-time licence tiers carry the same internal-use grant on the delivered file; the difference between them is freshness, plus one scope rule that applies only to the live API channel. A third access path — pay-per-call, below — needs no licence at all.

Snapshot ($499) — the delivered file

A frozen, versioned file (JSON · CSV · SQLite · Parquet). You may store it in full, locally and indefinitely. It is yours to keep under the perpetual grant above.

Snapshot + API ($1,499) — file plus 12-month live API

Everything in Snapshot (the file stays perpetual), plus 12 months of live REST access for your organisation's own internal queries. The API channel is internal-query-only:

• Cache and persist API responses internally for normal application use during the term — fine.
• Systematically extracting via the API to assemble a standalone or competing database is not — that is what the perpetual file is for.
• Surfacing API values to your own end-users or customers through any tool or interface (even in the background) is an embed and requires an Enterprise unlock.
• When the 12 months end, API access stops. Nothing happens to your delivered file, and you are under no obligation to delete it.

Pay-per-call — metered access, no licence

Separate from the two one-time licence tiers, Apex can be queried per call with no subscription and no licence purchase: the metered endpoints bill at the published per-call rate — $0.025 per row, $0.10 per search page, $0.25 per coverage call — settled via x402 (USDC on Base) or MPP (USDC on Base and Tempo). Pay-per-call is a metered right to use the values you fetch, not the perpetual internal-use grant on a delivered file; the redistribution, embed, and AI-training restrictions below apply to it the same way. Prices are at /pricing.

What you may not do

Without a written Enterprise unlock, you may not:

• Resell, redistribute, sublicense, lease, or otherwise make the dataset (or a substantial part of it) available to any third party.
• Embed Apex values in a customer-facing product, or expose them to your own end-users through a tool or interface.
• Use Apex data to train, fine-tune, or distil any machine-learning or AI model, or to build training corpora, embeddings, or synthetic datasets from it.
• Build, train, or seed a product that substitutes for the dataset (see No competing product).
• Remove or alter provenance, attribution, or proprietary notices.
• Share API tokens outside your organisation, or circumvent rate limits.

No competing product

You may not use the data to build a Competing Product: a product whose primary purpose is to license, sell, or provide vehicle-specification data, or a vehicle-spec query API, to third parties in substitution for Apex. This restriction applies to uses outside the scope of any right you have purchased — an Enterprise redistribution or embed unlock expressly permits what it grants, and this clause does not claw that back.

AI / ML training

Using Apex to train, fine-tune, distil, or otherwise develop any artificial-intelligence, machine-learning, large-language-model, or similar system is not permitted under the Snapshot SKUs. It is sold as a separate published right:

• Academic / non-commercial — a self-serve clickwrap licence for internal research, no model distribution.
• Commercial, internal model — published annual licence to train and run your own internal models.
• Model distribution / serving — distributing or serving a trained model is negotiated.

Training rights and source obligations are reviewed for the intended use; the standard snapshot is not represented as a separate source-exclusion profile. Reciprocally, Apex does not train models on your API queries. Prices at /pricing.

Derived results

You own the outputs of your own analysis. You may publish Derived Results externally with attribution, provided they: have no independent commercial value as a dataset; are not a substantial subset of Apex reproduced as data; and cannot be reverse-engineered back to row-level Apex values.

Auditor & regulator disclosure

Apex is bought to be reported. The licence expressly permits you to disclose the Licensed Data and its full provenance to external auditors, assurance providers, and financial regulators or supervisors for the purpose of regulatory reporting — PCAF financed-emissions, CSRD/ESRS, EBA Pillar 3 — and wherever disclosure is compelled by law. This carve-out applies in every tier, including the free sample.

Perpetual snapshot & continuity

The licence to a delivered snapshot is perpetual and irrevocable, and survives Apex's dissolution. A breach of these terms entitles Apex to damages and injunctive relief, but not to revoke the licence to a file you already hold or to compel its deletion. The only things that can stop are live API access and the delivery of future updates. The file you have downloaded is your business-continuity answer if Apex ever goes away.

Attribution

Externally-published Derived Results require attribution to the dataset and, where an underlying source licence requires it, to the original source. A single dataset-level credit is sufficient on paid tiers; the per-source detail you need is bundled in LICENSE-NOTES.md with every download. A short footer satisfies it:

Vehicle specifications: Apex DB (apex-db.org).
Underlying sources: EEA · EPA · NHTSA · Transport Canada · KBA · others.
Per-source attribution preserved in apex_provenance.

Source-specific terms & flow-down

Apex is built from 57 commercial-use cleared public and licensed sources. Most carry only an attribution requirement; a few carry terms that travel with the values. Every source has a row in LICENSE-NOTES.md recording its licence, attribution requirement, and any flow-down. The common patterns:

Public domain & CC0

EEA CO₂ monitoring, EPA fueleconomy.gov, NHTSA vPIC, Transport Canada fuel-consumption guide. Public-sector outputs with no restriction beyond optional attribution. Wikidata and the RDW (Netherlands) feed go a step further: they carry a CC0 public-domain dedication, so they require no attribution at all — Apex still records the source in the provenance row, but you inherit no attribution obligation from them.

CC-BY 4.0 and national open-government licences

EEA derived tables, JRC reports, and national open-data licences (UK OGL, Canada OGL, Germany DL-DE-BY, France Licence Ouverte, Korea KOGL, Swiss OGD, and others). All permit commercial use and redistribution; attribution to the original source is required and is preserved in the provenance row and in LICENSE-NOTES.md. None impose share-alike.

Wikipedia (CC-BY-SA 4.0)

Apex ingests only atomic factual values from Wikipedia — a CO₂ figure, a battery capacity, a power rating — never Wikipedia prose or table structure. We treat these isolated facts as non-copyrightable, and the rows are flagged in provenance so that a customer can identify them. The standard snapshot includes those rows under the product-wide CC-BY-SA posture; no separate source-exclusion artifact is currently advertised.

Manufacturer press

Direct numerical specs (power, torque, battery capacity) taken from publicly-issued manufacturer press releases, with the source URL cited on every value. A number of manufacturers are deliberately held back as non-redistributable where their press terms warrant it, so the shipped set stays clean.

Ownership & database rights

Individual facts are not owned by anyone. What Apex owns is the compilation — the curation, verification, normalisation, provenance, and DQ scoring that turn 57 current-release sources into one queryable dataset. In the EU and UK, such database rights as subsist in that compilation (Directive 96/9/EC) belong to Apex. Elsewhere — notably the United States, where there is no database right — the no-redistribution covenant in this licence is what protects the compilation. Either way, you own your own Derived Results.

Warranties & disclaimer

Apex represents that it has the right to license the data as described here, and that every shipped value is produced through a provenance-first pipeline — recording source, source URL, source class, applicable years, and a PCAF DQ score — from sources Apex has assessed as redistributable, with commercially reasonable care. This is a warranty about the methodology, not a guarantee of every individual value.

Beyond that, the dataset is provided as is. Accuracy and completeness are best-effort, backed by the provenance trail and DQ score on every value. The licence does not warrant fitness for a specific regulatory filing; for PCAF and similar reporting you remain responsible for verifying that the values you select meet your obligations.

Indemnity

For procurement that requires it, Apex offers an intellectual-property indemnity — covering third-party claims that authorised use of the dataset infringes their rights — capped and scoped in the order form, and excluding claims arising from your own out-of-scope use (redistribution, embed, or AI-training without the matching unlock). Request the indemnity and DPA terms at data@apex-db.org. Overall liability is capped per the Terms.

DPA, DORA & residency

Apex does not process customer personal data as part of delivering the dataset — the data covers vehicles, not people. Billing runs through Stripe; email through standard providers; sub-processors are disclosed. A DPA is available on request. For EU financial-entity buyers subject to DORA, Apex provides the baseline contractual items — data-processing location and change notice, exit and return-of-data, regulator cooperation, and termination notice — and Register-of-Information fields on request. Contact data@apex-db.org.

Enterprise unlocks

The restrictions above lift selectively. Each right is scoped and priced independently — you buy only what you need, and three of them carry published out-of-box prices at /pricing:

• External redistribution / resale — make the dataset available to third parties; published from a flat starting price, final scope priced by channel and reach (we vet the buyer first).
• Embed / OEM — surface Apex values to your own end-users; published flat annual bands by end-user count.
• AI / ML training — published academic and commercial-internal licences; model distribution negotiated.
• Custom scope — refresh cadence, regional slices, SLA, EU data residency, escrow, a negotiated indemnity and liability cap, and your own master agreement.

The published prices are the standard data right; the risk wrapper (indemnity cap, your master agreement, SLA) is settled on a short order form. Talk to us at data@apex-db.org — see /pricing.