Sunlight Foundation

API Terms of Service

• You are welcome to use almost all of our APIs for any legal purpose you’d like, including commercial uses — lots of people do. The exception to this is our Influence Explorer API, which has some requirements around attribution and noncommercial use (see below).

• We work hard to deliver a service of excellent quality, but we can’t make any guarantees about accuracy, availability or anything else. Use of our APIs and data is entirely at your own risk. (If you spot a problem, please let us know about it so we can fix it!)

• We reserve the right to terminate or throttle your access to our APIs if we decide we have to. This happens very, very rarely. The best way to avoid it is not to hammer our servers — capping your queries at 2 per second is a good rule of thumb. If that’s too little, get in touch with us so we can figure something out.

• We need to collect some information from you before issuing an API key, but we respect your privacy. You can find our full privacy policy here. Please take a moment to read it.

• Our Influence Explorer API exposes data from upstream partners that license their offerings under CC-BY-NC-SA terms. If you use the Influence Explorer API’s campaign finance data you must credit the Center for Responsive Politics and/or the National Institute on Money in State Politics (for federal- and state-level data, respectively). If you want to use their data for commercial purposes you’ll need to talk to them about a separate licensing agreement (we’d be happy to make an introduction). Earmark data must be attributed to Taxpayers for Common Sense. Also, keep in mind that there are federal and state restrictions on how you use campaign finance data. For instance, you can’t use FEC data to solicit political donations. You’re responsible for understanding and obeying these laws.