Terms, without the fine print.

These terms govern your use of LexAPI — the REST API, MCP server, SDKs, dashboard and website at lex-api.com (together, “the Service”), operated by Arieta Labs Ltd (“we”, “us”), a private limited company registered in England and Wales under company number 16629785, registered office: 128 City Road, London, EC1V 2NX, United Kingdom.

By creating an account, making an API request or otherwise using the Service, you accept these terms. If you use the Service on behalf of a company, you confirm you are authorised to bind it. You must be at least 18 years old. If you do not agree with these terms, do not use the Service.

LexAPI provides programmatic access to European Union legal data sourced from EUR-Lex: parsed legislation and case-law, semantic search, a typed citation graph, document-change webhooks, exports, official SDKs and an MCP server. Where enabled for your account, it also provides legislation and case-law published by national sources of individual countries (§7).

The Service is data infrastructure for developers and professionals. It is not legal advice, and no output of the Service — search results, parsed text, citations or anything else — should be relied on as legal advice. See §7 for what we do and don’t promise about the data.

To use the Service you must:

• Provide accurate registration information and keep it current
• Keep your password, two-factor codes and API keys confidential
• Treat API keys like passwords: don’t commit them to public repositories, embed them in client-side code or share them with parties outside your organisation

You are responsible for all activity under your account and keys, including the credits it consumes. If you believe a key is compromised, revoke it in your dashboard immediately — you can create and revoke keys yourself, subject to a per-plan cap on active keys. We recommend enabling two-factor authentication, available in your dashboard.

Credit pools. Each plan includes a monthly pool of credits. Operations debit the pool at published rates — for example a document read settles at 1 credit from our corpus, 4 via the Publications Office Cellar API, or 5 on a live browser fetch (differences automatically refunded), and a semantic search costs 5; the full schedule is in the documentation. Included credits reset at the start of each billing cycle and unused included credits do not accumulate across cycles.

No surprise overage. We notify you when you have used about 80% of your pool. At 100%, further billable requests are rejected (HTTP 402) until your cycle resets, you upgrade, or you buy a top-up. We never charge overage automatically unless you have explicitly enabled auto top-up.

Top-ups. You can buy one-time credit packs mid-cycle. Top-up credits are valid until the end of your current billing cycle and do not roll over. Auto top-up is optional and off by default: if you enable it, exhausting your pool triggers a purchase of your chosen pack instead of a 402.

Plans and prices. Current tiers — including a Free tier whose credits refresh roughly every 30 days, no card required — are listed on the pricing page. Prices are in euros; VAT, where applicable, is calculated at checkout. Payments are processed by Stripe on a recurring basis (monthly, or annually at a discount) until you cancel.

Plan changes. Plan changes take effect immediately in both directions: upgrades carry a prorated charge for the remainder of the cycle, and downgrades credit the unused difference toward your next invoice. If you are on a legacy (grandfathered) plan, you keep its terms until you actively switch to a current plan — switching is permanent.

Price changes. We may change prices with at least 30 days’ notice by email. Changes never apply retroactively to a billing period you have already paid for.

Cancellation. You can cancel your subscription from your dashboard at any time. You keep access until the end of the billing period you have paid for; we do not refund partial periods except where the law requires otherwise.

Refunds. If a top-up purchase is refunded, the corresponding credits are removed from your pool. For anything you believe went wrong with billing, contact [email protected] — we would rather fix it than argue about it.

Account deletion. Deleting your account (see the privacy notice, §9) cancels any active subscription immediately and permanently erases your data. Deletion is not the same as cancellation: cancellation preserves your account and remaining access; deletion removes both, irreversibly.

You agree not to:

• Use the Service for any unlawful purpose
• Circumvent or attempt to circumvent rate limits, credit metering or other usage controls — including by distributing load across multiple accounts
• Resell, sublicense or otherwise redistribute raw API access, or republish data obtained through the Service as a standalone dataset or in any way that substitutes for the Service (building and selling your own products on top of the API is what it is for — proxying our API wholesale, or handing our corpus onward, is not)
• Use content obtained through the Service — including Structured Data (§7) — to train, fine-tune or evaluate machine-learning or artificial-intelligence models, or to create embeddings or derived datasets for those purposes, without a separate written licence from us (if that is what you need, email us — this is exactly what Enterprise agreements are for)
• Share API keys outside your organisation
• Probe, overload or interfere with the Service, or test its security without our prior written permission
• Register webhook endpoints at URLs you do not control, or use webhooks to direct traffic at third parties
• Use case-law obtained through the Service to evaluate, analyse, compare, rank or predict the decisions or professional practices of identifiable judges or court officials. (For French case-law this is a criminal offence under Article 33 of Law No. 2019-222; some sources license their case-law on this condition, and we apply it to all of it.)
• Misrepresent LexAPI output as an official publication (of EUR-Lex or of any national source), as an authoritative statement of the law, or present it to others as legal advice

We may throttle, suspend or terminate access that violates this section — see §12.

Source and attribution. The legal content available through the Service originates from EUR-Lex and is © European Union, 1998–2026. Reuse is authorised under the Commission’s reuse policy (Decision 2011/833/EU). When you republish document content obtained through the Service, you must preserve attribution to EUR-Lex as the source, as that policy requires. Our parsing, structuring, enrichment and citation graph (together, the “Structured Data”) are LexAPI’s work (§8); the underlying legal texts remain the EU’s, and nothing in these terms restricts your right to obtain them directly from their public sources.

National sources. Legislation and case-law from national sources are published by the public bodies of each country, under each source’s own licence or reuse terms. Every national document returned by the API carries an attribution statement naming its source and licence; when you republish that content you must preserve that attribution and comply with the source’s licence. Where a source makes its data available on conditions (for example, restrictions on profiling judges, or on re-identifying people named in pseudonymised judgments), those conditions apply to your use of that source’s content through the Service, and you must not attempt to re-identify anyone a court has anonymised or pseudonymised.

Accuracy. We work hard to parse faithfully and ingest changes quickly, but we do not warrant that the data is complete, current or error-free. Only the texts published in the Official Journal of the European Union — and, for national law, in each country’s official gazette or other authentic publication — are authentic; consolidated versions are documentation tools. You are responsible for verifying any information obtained through the Service before relying on it for legal or professional purposes.

Ours. The Service — its code, design, documentation, SDKs, data structuring and brand — belongs to LexAPI and is protected by intellectual-property law. This includes database rights in the LexAPI database: its structure, its Structured Data and enrichments, and the selection and arrangement of its contents. These terms give you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use it while your account is in good standing; they transfer no ownership.

Yours. Applications, products and content you build using the Service are yours.

Feedback. If you send us suggestions or feedback, you grant us a perpetual, royalty-free licence to use it without obligation to you.

Paid plans can register webhook endpoints to receive notifications about new or changed documents. Deliveries are HMAC-signed so you can verify they came from us; verifying the signature is your responsibility. Delivery is best-effort with retries — webhooks are a notification channel, not a system of record, so do not build anything that breaks if a single delivery is missed.

You must control the endpoints you register. We may disable endpoints that persistently fail, and per-plan limits cap how many webhooks you can run.

We target high availability and publish real-time service status and history at lex-api.com/status. We may need to suspend parts of the Service for maintenance or upgrades; where practical, we will do so at low-traffic times.

Unless you have an Enterprise agreement with an explicit service-level commitment, availability is provided on a best-effort basis and outages do not give rise to liability or refunds.

THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE”, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED — INCLUDING MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT.

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, WE ARE NOT LIABLE FOR INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR LOST PROFITS, REVENUE, DATA OR GOODWILL, ARISING FROM YOUR USE OF OR INABILITY TO USE THE SERVICE. OUR TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY UNDER THESE TERMS IS LIMITED TO THE AMOUNTS YOU PAID US IN THE 12 MONTHS PRECEDING THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM.

Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot be excluded under applicable law, including mandatory consumer protections in your country of residence.

You agree to indemnify LexAPI and its people against claims, damages and expenses (including reasonable legal fees) arising from your use of the Service, your violation of these terms, or your violation of any third party’s rights.

We may suspend or terminate your access if you materially breach these terms (including §6), if required by law, or for non-payment. Where reasonable, we will notify you and give you a chance to fix the problem first; for serious abuse we may act immediately. You can end this agreement at any time by cancelling and deleting your account (§5). Provisions that by their nature survive termination — including §7, §8, §11 and this section — survive it.

We may revise these terms as the Service evolves. For material changes we will give you at least 30 days’ notice by email or dashboard notice before they take effect. If you continue using the Service after the effective date, the revised terms apply; if you do not agree with them, cancel before that date and the change will not bind you for your remaining paid period.

These terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales, and disputes belong to the courts of England and Wales — without prejudice to mandatory consumer protections and forum rights in your country of residence, including those under European Union law if you are an EU consumer.

Before anything formal, email us: most issues are resolved in a reply or two. Legal questions: [email protected]. Everything else: [email protected]. How we handle your data is covered in the privacy notice.