Agreement
By purchasing or using Footnote, you agree to these terms and our Privacy policy. If you don't agree, please don't use the service.
What you're buying
A research brief produced by Footnote based on public data. It is informational, not investment, tax, employment, or legal advice.
Eligibility
You must be 18 or older and legally capable of entering a contract in your jurisdiction.
Payments
Briefs are billed once via Stripe at the price displayed at checkout. All prices in USD.
Delivery
A brief is compiled after checkout and delivered to your dashboard and email when ready. If any required source is unreachable, we will tell you, refund the brief, and queue a re-compile when conditions allow.
Refunds
Refunds within seven days of delivery, no questions asked. Email us and we will process.
Acceptable use
Don't use Footnote to harass, dox, or build lists of individuals. Don't represent a Footnote brief as a regulatory filing, an investment recommendation, or a hiring decision.
Warranty & liability
The brief is provided as-is. We disclaim warranties to the maximum extent allowed. Our liability is capped at the price you paid for the brief in question.
What our research is (and isn't)
Footnote reports what public records state — government filings, court dockets, and official disclosures — with citations to the source. A brief, tracker entry, or newsroom finding is a statement about those records, not an endorsement of, affiliation with, or judgment by any company mentioned. We are not affiliated with, sponsored by, or approved by any employer we report on.
Public sources can contain errors or lag reality; where a source is unavailable or unclear, we say so rather than guess. Decisions you make — accepting, declining, or negotiating an offer; staying or leaving — are yours, and outcomes are not warranted.
Your license & ours
Your brief is licensed to you for personal, non-commercial use. You may share it via the read-only link feature; you may not resell briefs or systematically republish their contents.
What's ours: the Footnote site, briefs, and the underlying compiled dataset — our selection, arrangement, normalization, and enrichment of public records — are Footnote's proprietary work, protected as an original compilation and, where applicable, by database rights. The underlying government facts belong to everyone; the corpus we built from them belongs to us.
What we license out, and how: our published aggregates (like the open WARN dataset) and newsroom findings are licensed CC BY 4.0 — cite Footnote and they're yours, commercially included. Free-tier Data API responses are likewise CC BY 4.0 for display with attribution. Paid-tier API output is licensed to your account for internal use and for publishing work derived from it (analysis, journalism, product features) with attribution; it may not be redistributed in substantial portions, resold as data, or used to assemble a competing or substitute dataset. Licensed exports carry their own written terms. Each API response states its license in meta.license.
Reading vs. taking: reading our public pages — including by search engines and the AI crawlers we admit via robots.txt — is welcome. Circumventing authentication, payment, or rate limits, scraping at scale, or bulk-extracting the dataset outside the Data API is not.
Subscriptions & renewal
Memberships, Company Watch, and Data Pro are recurring subscriptions: they renew automatically at the then-current price for your plan until you cancel, and we state the price and interval at checkout before you pay. Free trials convert to paid at the end of the stated trial period unless you cancel first.
You can cancel online from your account at any time — no phone call, no chat queue. Cancellation stops future renewals, and your access runs to the end of the period you've paid for. Promotional ("founding") rates stay locked while your subscription remains active and end permanently if it lapses.
Termination
You can stop using Footnote and delete your account at any time from settings (see the Privacy policy for what deletion does). We may suspend or terminate an account that violates these terms — for example, abuse of the acceptable-use rules or circumvention of payment — with notice where practicable. If we terminate without cause, we will refund the unused portion of any active subscription. Sections that by their nature survive (licenses granted, liability limits, disputes) survive termination.
Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Illinois, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules. Where a dispute is heard in court (see the carve-outs in the Disputes section), it will be heard in the state or federal courts located in Illinois, and both of us consent to that venue.
Disputes — talk first, then individual arbitration
Talk to us first. Before any formal proceeding, email hello@usefootnote.com with your name, a description of the issue, and what you'd like us to do. We'll do the same in reverse. Both sides agree to try in good faith to resolve the dispute informally for 60 days — most things (including refunds) are resolved in days.
Small claims stay simple. Either of us may bring an individual claim in small-claims court instead of arbitration.
Arbitration, individually. Any other dispute is resolved by binding individual arbitration before National Arbitration and Mediation (NAM) under its Comprehensive Dispute Resolution Rules, seated in Illinois or conducted remotely at your option. Class actions and class arbitrations are waived — each side may bring claims only in an individual capacity. The arbitrator (not a court) decides arbitrability, except that a court decides the enforceability of this class waiver. We pay the arbitration fees that exceed what filing the same claim in court would have cost you, unless the arbitrator finds the claim frivolous.
If many similar claims arrive at once (25 or more filed by the same or coordinated counsel), both sides agree NAM will resolve them in concurrent batches of up to 50 with a single arbitrator per batch, to keep proceedings efficient. All statutes of limitation are tolled from the first filing until a claimant's batch concludes, and no claimant is bound by the outcome of anyone else's case.
Your right to opt out. You may opt out of this arbitration section entirely — with no effect on any other term — by emailing hello@usefootnote.com within 30 days of first accepting these terms, with "arbitration opt-out" and the email on your account.