Terms of Service

1. The service

Petrel ("Petrel," "we," "us"), operator of petreldata.io, provides global natural-hazard data products — including calibrated hazard susceptibility surfaces ("Petrel Surfaces"), return-period intensity rasters ("Petrel Returns"), derived input datasets ("Petrel Layers"), hosted query APIs, sample datasets, and related documentation (collectively, the "Service"). These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern all access to and use of the Service, including free samples, metered API subscriptions, Layer downloads, and bulk data deliveries, unless superseded by a signed enterprise agreement.

2. Accounts and API keys

You must provide accurate account information and keep your credentials confidential. API keys are issued per account, are confidential, and may not be shared outside your organization or embedded in client-side code exposed to third parties. You are responsible for all usage under your keys. We may suspend keys that show evidence of compromise, abuse, or use that materially degrades the Service for others. You must be at least 18 years old and able to form a binding contract to use the Service.

3. Subscriptions, metering, and payment

Paid plans are billed through Stripe on a monthly subscription basis, with included request quotas and, where enabled, metered overage billed at the per-request rate shown at checkout. Usage is metered per API call and reconciled daily. Quotas reset each billing period; unused quota does not roll over. You may disable overage billing in your account, in which case requests beyond your quota are rejected rather than billed. Plan changes and cancellation are self-serve via the billing portal; cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period. Except where required by law, fees are non-refundable. Fees are exclusive of taxes; you are responsible for applicable taxes other than those on Petrel's net income.

4. Data license and ownership

Subject to these Terms and payment of applicable fees, Petrel grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license to use hazard data retrieved through the Service for your internal business purposes — including underwriting, portfolio analysis, site selection, and regulatory disclosure preparation. Petrel Layers are licensed separately for non-commercial use under CC-BY-NC-4.0 unless you hold a written commercial license; the per-Layer license governs.

You may not: (a) resell, sublicense, redistribute, or syndicate Petrel data or any substantially similar derivative dataset; (b) use Petrel data to build or train a competing hazard-scoring product; (c) remove or obscure attribution or provenance metadata; or (d) publicly publish raw rasters or bulk extracts. You may publish analyses, maps, and scores derived from Petrel data in reports, filings, and customer deliverables, with attribution to "Petrel (petreldata.io)" where practical. Free sample tiles are licensed for evaluation use only.

As between the parties, Petrel and its licensors retain all intellectual property rights in the Service and the data products. You retain all rights in your own input data and in the analyses and deliverables you create using the Service.

5. Acceptable use

You agree not to: use the Service in violation of any law or third-party right; attempt to re-identify individuals from, or merge personal data into, hazard outputs; reverse engineer, decompile, or attempt to extract the underlying source datasets embedded in a product (see Section 6); circumvent, disable, or overload metering, rate limits, or access controls; or use the Service to develop a competing product.

High-risk and life-safety uses are prohibited as a sole or primary basis: the Service must not be relied upon as the sole input for emergency response, evacuation, life-safety engineering, or any use where an error could lead to death, personal injury, or severe environmental or property damage. Such uses require independent, qualified professional assessment.

6. Third-party data, licensing, and attribution

Petrel products are derived from third-party datasets, each used under its own license. Petrel represents that it distributes its products consistent with the rights it holds in those inputs, or under separate license from the data provider. Required source attributions are published in the per-product documentation and provenance records, and carry through to your use: you must preserve provenance metadata and reproduce the applicable source attributions when you redistribute permitted derivatives.

Representative sources and their terms include: Copernicus / ECMWF ERA5 and Copernicus DEM (Copernicus license); ESA WorldCover, ISRIC SoilGrids, ETH/WorldPop (Creative Commons Attribution); HydroSHEDS / HydroRIVERS (WWF license — free for commercial use, citing Lehner, Verdin & Jarvis 2008, and not redistributable as a stand-alone product); OpenStreetMap (ODbL); and public-domain sources (NASA, NOAA, USGS, LANDFIRE). Certain embedded data — including HydroSHEDS — require that downstream users not extract or redistribute the underlying source data as a stand-alone product and that protective terms at least as restrictive as these Terms be maintained; by using the Service you agree to these pass-through restrictions. Where a source is licensed for non-commercial use only, the affected product is offered solely under a non-commercial license or under Petrel's separate license with that provider.

7. Hazard data — important disclaimers

Petrel data products are the output of probabilistic and statistical models built from historical observations, remote sensing, and physical simulation. They estimate relative hazard at native model resolution on a global, comparable scale. They are not, and must not be treated as: a property-level engineering or geotechnical assessment; a prediction that any specific event will or will not occur at any specific location or time; or a guarantee of safety or of loss.

Model scores carry uncertainty, which we quantify and ship per-pixel alongside every release; coverage masks identify areas of reduced input-data quality, and known model limitations are documented in each product's model card. You are responsible for determining whether the Service is fit for your use case, for independently verifying results that drive material decisions, and for the decisions you make using the Service.

8. No professional advice

The Service does not constitute and is not a substitute for professional engineering, geotechnical, actuarial, insurance, financial, investment, or legal advice. Nothing in the Service is a recommendation to underwrite, price, lend, buy, sell, or insure any asset. You are solely responsible for compliance with any regulatory regime that applies to you — including insurance rate-filing requirements and climate-risk disclosure frameworks (e.g., TCFD, ISSB/IFRS S2, EU CSRD/ESRS, Solvency II, and applicable SEC rules). Petrel publishes versioned, documented, reproducible methodology to support your own diligence, but makes no representation that any product is approved or accepted by any regulator.

9. Availability and changes

Self-serve plans are provided without an uptime SLA. We target high availability and publish versioned, reproducible data vintages, but the Service may be modified, interrupted, or updated — including corrections and re-releases of hazard surfaces — at any time. Enterprise SLAs are available under separate contract.

10. Warranty disclaimer

THE SERVICE AND ALL DATA ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE," WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, ACCURACY, TITLE, OR NON-INFRINGEMENT. WITHOUT LIMITING THE FOREGOING, PETREL DOES NOT WARRANT THAT HAZARD SCORES, CLASSIFICATIONS, OR RETURN-PERIOD VALUES ARE ACCURATE OR COMPLETE FOR ANY SPECIFIC LOCATION OR EVENT, OR THAT THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED OR ERROR-FREE.

11. Limitation of liability

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, PETREL WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR LOST PROFITS, LOST DATA, OR UNDERWRITING, LENDING, OR INVESTMENT LOSSES, ARISING FROM OR RELATED TO THE SERVICE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY. PETREL'S TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY UNDER THESE TERMS WILL NOT EXCEED THE FEES YOU PAID TO PETREL IN THE TWELVE (12) MONTHS PRECEDING THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM. THESE LIMITS ALLOCATE RISK BETWEEN THE PARTIES AND ARE A BASIS OF THE BARGAIN; SOME JURISDICTIONS DO NOT ALLOW CERTAIN EXCLUSIONS, SO SOME MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU.

12. Indemnification

You will defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Petrel and its officers, employees, and licensors from and against any third-party claims, damages, and costs (including reasonable legal fees) arising from your use of the Service in violation of these Terms, your violation of any law or third-party right (including source-data license terms), or your reliance on or distribution of outputs in breach of Sections 4–8.

13. Export control and sanctions

You must comply with all applicable export-control and economic-sanctions laws, including those of the United States (EAR and OFAC) and the European Union. You represent that you are not located in, organized under the laws of, or ordinarily resident in a comprehensively sanctioned jurisdiction, and that you are not a restricted or denied party. You may not provide access to the Service to any such party or use it for any purpose prohibited by these laws.

14. Data protection

Our handling of personal data is described in the Privacy Policy, which is incorporated into these Terms. For account and billing data Petrel acts as a controller; for the query inputs you submit through the API Petrel acts as your processor and processes them only to return responses and maintain service logs. A Data Processing Addendum, including standard contractual clauses for international transfers, is available for enterprise and EU/UK customers on request.

15. Termination

You may cancel at any time via the billing portal. We may suspend or terminate access for breach of these Terms, including license violations or non-payment. Sections 4–8, 10–14, and 16 survive termination. Upon termination you must cease use of data retrieved under a paid license, except for copies already embedded in analyses, reports, or filings produced during the subscription term, which you may retain subject to the ongoing restrictions in Sections 4 and 6.

16. General

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, USA, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. They are the entire agreement between you and Petrel regarding the Service and supersede prior understandings. You may not assign them without our consent; we may assign them to a successor in connection with a merger or sale of assets. No failure to enforce a provision is a waiver; if any provision is unenforceable, the remainder stays in effect. Neither party is liable for delays caused by events beyond its reasonable control. We may update these Terms; material changes will be announced via the email on your account at least 14 days before they take effect, and continued use after that date constitutes acceptance. Questions: petreldata.io@gmail.com.