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Create a free account — 500 credits every month, no credit card — and your API key is ready in the dashboard. Send it in the x-api-key header, or drop it into the official Python / TypeScript SDKs or the MCP server for Claude and Cursor. The documentation has runnable examples for every endpoint (press ⌘K to search it from anywhere).

Every plan includes a monthly pool of credits, and each operation debits it at a published rate — a document read settles at 1 credit from our corpus, 4 via the Publications Office Cellar API, or 5 on a live EUR-Lex fetch (differences are refunded automatically); keyword search is 3 per result page, a semantic search 5, citation-graph analysis 20. The full schedule is in the docs. Included credits reset at the start of each billing cycle.

We warn you when you have used about 80% of your pool. At 100%, billable requests return HTTP 402 until your cycle resets, you upgrade, or you buy a one-time top-up pack. There are no surprise overage charges — auto top-up exists, but it is opt-in and off by default.

Yes, from the pricing page at any time — your subscription is updated in place, never duplicated. Both directions apply immediately: upgrades add a prorated charge for the rest of the cycle, downgrades credit the unused difference toward your next invoice. One caveat: if you are on a legacy (pre-2026) plan, switching to a current plan is permanent — see the pricing page for details.

Cancel your subscription from the dashboard and you keep access until the end of the period you paid for. Deleting your account is a separate, stronger action: it cancels billing immediately and permanently erases your data — keys, logs, everything. See the privacy notice for exactly what deletion removes.

We do not refund partial billing periods except where the law requires it — but if something went wrong with billing, email [email protected] and we will sort it out. The details live in the terms, §5.

API-key authentication: include your key in the x-api-key header on every request. You can create, rotate and revoke keys in your dashboard (each plan has a cap on active keys). Treat keys like passwords — never commit them to a repository or ship them in client-side code.

Per-minute limits scale with your plan — from 15 requests/minute on Free to 600 on Scale. Exceeding your rate returns HTTP 429; back off and retry (the SDKs handle this for you, respecting Retry-After).

The corpus ingests changes from EUR-Lex and the Official Journal on an hourly delta cycle, and the corpus page shows live coverage. If you need to know the moment something changes, register a webhook on a saved search and we will notify you — deliveries are HMAC-signed.

Yes — every plan, including Free, allows commercial use. Building products on top of the API is exactly what it is for; wholesale reselling of raw API access is not. When you republish document content, keep the attribution to EUR-Lex as the source — the terms, §7, explain the EU reuse policy.

No. LexAPI is data infrastructure — parsed documents, search and citations. Only the texts published in the Official Journal are authentic, and you should verify anything you rely on professionally.

The status page shows live availability and incident history for the API, semantic search and webhooks. If status is green but your integration misbehaves, email [email protected] with the request ID from the response headers and we will dig in.