Legal
Terms of Service
v2 · Last updated Aug 14, 2026
Effective date: 30 days after publication (to be announced)
Version 1, in effect until the date above, is archived at /terms/v1.
These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern your access to and use of the MarketCheck Developer Platform, the MarketCheck APIs, the MarketCheck Model Context Protocol (MCP) endpoints, the developer dashboard at developers.marketcheck.com, and any related data, software, documentation, sample code, or services made available to you (collectively, the "Service"). By creating an account, accessing the Service, or making any API call, you ("Customer", "you") agree to these Terms with Market Check Cars, Inc., a Nevada corporation ("MarketCheck", "we"). If you are agreeing on behalf of an organization, you represent that you have authority to bind that organization, and "you" means both you and the organization.
Read these Terms carefully. Sections 5 (Restrictions), 6 (AI & Training), 7 (Caching & Retention), 9 (Suspension & Termination), and 12 (Limitation of Liability) materially limit your rights.
1. Account & Eligibility
1.1 You must be at least 18 years old and legally capable of entering into a binding contract to create an account.
1.2 You must provide accurate, complete, and current account information — including a valid business email address, your real name, your real company affiliation (where applicable), and a working payment method. Creating fake accounts, fictitious business names, throw-away or temporary email addresses, or otherwise providing materially misleading information at sign-up is prohibited and is grounds for immediate termination without refund.
1.3 You are responsible for all activity that occurs under your account credentials, including activity by your employees, contractors, or end users who you grant access (your "Users"). You must keep your API keys, dashboard login credentials, and any MCP authentication material secure and confidential.
1.4 You may not create more than one account in order to evade rate limits, free-tier limits, billing thresholds, suspensions, blocks, or other account-level constraints. We may detect and consolidate duplicate accounts at our sole discretion.
1.5 You will notify us at security@marketcheck.com promptly if you suspect any unauthorized access, key compromise, or other security incident.
2. The Service & Subscription Plans
2.1 The Service exposes vehicle inventory, pricing, history, decode, and related automotive data ("MarketCheck Data") through REST APIs and MCP servers. The specific endpoints, rate limits, data freshness, and feature scope available to you depend on the subscription tier you select on the pricing page.
2.2 Subscription tiers, base prices, and per-call data fees are described on developers.marketcheck.com. We may revise plan terms and pricing prospectively on 30 days' notice; continued use after the effective date constitutes acceptance.
2.3 Data fees are usage-based: every successful API call against a billable endpoint accrues a per-call charge at your tier's rate. Where your tier specifies a billing threshold (e.g., $250 / $500 / $1,000), accrued usage that exceeds the threshold may be invoiced and charged immediately rather than at the end of the month.
2.4 If a payment fails, you will receive notification and a recovery window (currently 14 days) to update your payment method. If payment is not recovered within the window, your subscription may be paused, your API keys may be revoked at the gateway level, and your access may be restricted until payment is restored.
3. Your Permitted Use
3.1 Subject to these Terms, MarketCheck grants you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable, revocable license, during your active subscription, to access the Service and to use MarketCheck Data solely to power the internal-use applications, end-user-facing applications, or analytical workflows you operate yourself, and only on the URLs / endpoints described in your subscription.
3.2 You may display MarketCheck Data within your own applications to your own end users, provided that you do not facilitate, encourage, or enable end users to scrape, redistribute, or reconstitute the MarketCheck Data outside of those applications.
3.3 All rights not expressly granted are reserved by MarketCheck. The Service, MarketCheck Data, MarketCheck branding, and all underlying intellectual property are and remain the exclusive property of MarketCheck and its licensors.
4. Reservations of Rights to MarketCheck Data
4.1 MarketCheck Data is licensed, not sold. You acquire no ownership interest in MarketCheck Data, in any derivative aggregate, index, ranking, model weight, or compilation thereof.
4.2 You acknowledge that MarketCheck has invested substantial resources to collect, curate, normalize, deduplicate, enrich, and maintain MarketCheck Data, and that the data has independent commercial value.
5. Restrictions & Prohibited Uses
5.1 You will not, and will not permit any of your Users or any third party to:
5.1.1 Resell, sublicense, lease, lend, distribute, syndicate, share, transfer, or make available the Service, your API credentials, MarketCheck Data, or any extract or derivative thereof to any third party, including but not limited to data brokers, marketplaces, aggregators, agencies acting on behalf of others, white-label resellers, or other API providers. Each subscription is for the sole use of the contracting Customer.
5.1.2 Build, train, fine-tune, evaluate, validate, benchmark, augment, distill, or otherwise improve any machine-learning model, foundation model, large language model, embedding model, retrieval system, vector database, or other AI/ML system using MarketCheck Data without prior written permission from MarketCheck. This restriction applies to first-party models you train, third-party models you fine-tune or feed (whether through training APIs, in-context learning at scale, or batch ingestion), and aggregated datasets you publish or transfer. See also Section 6.
5.1.3 Build a competing product or service. You will not use MarketCheck Data, the Dealer Directory, dealer attributes, dealer rankings, dealer monitoring, listings, pricing, history, or any other portion of the Service to develop, market, sell, or operate a product or service that competes with MarketCheck (including any automotive data API, vehicle marketplace data product, dealer-intelligence product, automotive-pricing product, listing-syndication product, or similar). You will not use MarketCheck Data to enrich your own competing data set.
5.1.4 Cache, store, archive, persist, copy, or otherwise retain MarketCheck API responses or MarketCheck Data beyond the minimum operational period required to display the data within a single end-user request (as further described in Section 7). You will not build an offline copy, mirror, derivative database, snapshot, training corpus, or historical archive of MarketCheck Data.
5.1.5 Scrape, harvest, crawl, mass-export, batch-download, page-spider, or otherwise systematically extract MarketCheck Data from the Service, the developer dashboard, the marketing site, third-party sites containing MarketCheck Data, or downstream applications that consume MarketCheck Data. You will not use bots, headless browsers, RPA tools, scrapers, or other automation that simulates human browsing to evade rate limits, billing, or these Terms.
5.1.6 Reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, or attempt to discover the source code, model weights, schema-generation logic, internal architecture, or proprietary trade secrets of the Service, except to the limited extent permitted by applicable law that cannot be contractually waived.
5.1.7 Remove, obscure, or alter any proprietary notices, attributions, watermarks, copyright marks, or branding in MarketCheck Data or in the Service.
5.1.8 Use the Service in a manner that interferes with the integrity, security, or performance of the Service, including by exceeding documented rate limits, by intentional load testing without prior coordination, by probing for vulnerabilities outside an authorised security-research program, or by exploiting any bug or undocumented behaviour.
5.1.9 Use the Service to harass, defame, defraud, discriminate against, or otherwise harm any person, or in any way that violates applicable law (including consumer-protection, fair-housing, fair-lending, unfair-trade-practice, anti-discrimination, anti-spam, and data-protection laws).
5.1.10 Create multiple accounts to evade plan limits, free-tier limits, blocks, or suspensions; impersonate another person or organization; or use stolen, fake, or temporary email addresses or payment methods.
5.1.11 Use the Service to power surveillance, predictive policing, social-scoring, or similar systems intended to track individuals.
6. AI & Model Training
6.1 You may not use MarketCheck Data, in whole or in part, to train, fine-tune, evaluate, distill, or otherwise build the capability of any AI model, embedding, retrieval system, or vector store, regardless of whether the model is yours, an open-source model, a hosted commercial model, or a third-party model accessed via API, without a separate written agreement signed by an authorised MarketCheck representative. This includes:
a) Direct training (gradient descent over MarketCheck Data).
b) Reinforcement-learning reward models built on MarketCheck Data.
c) Fine-tuning third-party models with MarketCheck Data, including via OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or other vendor fine-tuning APIs.
d) Building retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) corpora, vector databases, or knowledge graphs that persist MarketCheck Data beyond a single user query session.
e) Generating synthetic data derived from MarketCheck Data.
f) Within a real-time conversational session - for example, where an end user asks a question via your AI application, your application calls the MarketCheck API on demand, and the response is rendered to that end user and then discarded - using MarketCheck Data as in-context information is permitted, provided that you do not persist the response, the context window, or the conversation history in a way that creates a durable training corpus or competing data set.
If you wish to use MarketCheck Data for AI training or model evaluation, contact api@marketcheck.com.
7. Caching & Retention
7.1 To safeguard the freshness, accuracy, and commercial value of MarketCheck Data, caching of API responses beyond what is strictly necessary to render a single end-user request is prohibited. You will not maintain a persistent cache, a TTL-extended cache, a CDN cache, a database mirror, or any equivalent for MarketCheck Data.
7.2 Limited, transient in-memory caching for the duration of a single end-user request (typically seconds) is permitted, provided that the cached data is not used to fulfil subsequent requests, is not shared across users, and is not persisted across server restarts.
7.3 Storing the minimum amount of MarketCheck Data necessary to operate billing reconciliation, audit logs, and customer support workflows is permitted, provided that such storage is not used as a substitute for live API calls and is not redistributed.
7.4 Enterprise tier subscribers may negotiate caching, snapshotting, or bulk-data terms in a separate written agreement.
8. Attribution & Branding
8.1 Where MarketCheck Data is displayed to end users in your application, you will not falsely attribute the data to yourself or a third party, and you will not represent that you are the originator of the data. On request from MarketCheck, you will display a reasonable "Data powered by MarketCheck" attribution.
8.2 You will not use MarketCheck's name, logos, or trademarks except in accordance with our brand guidelines and only to indicate that your application uses the Service. Use of MarketCheck's trademarks in a manner that implies endorsement, partnership, or affiliation beyond an API customer relationship is prohibited without prior written consent.
9. Suspension & Termination
9.1 MarketCheck may, at its discretion, throttle, suspend, or terminate your access to the Service immediately and without notice if: (a) you breach these Terms or our Acceptable Use Policy; (b) your account exhibits behaviour consistent with fraud, abuse, scraping, AI-training, redistribution, or competing-product development; (c) your payment fails and is not recovered within the recovery window; (d) you create or operate fake / duplicate accounts; (e) your usage threatens the security, integrity, or performance of the Service or its other customers; or (f) we are required to do so to comply with law or third-party obligations.
9.2 You may cancel your subscription at any time via the developer dashboard. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period and you remain responsible for accrued data fees up to the cancellation date.
9.3 Upon termination for any reason, your right to access the Service ends, your API keys are revoked, and you must promptly purge any remaining MarketCheck Data from your systems (subject only to the narrow operational/billing/audit-log retention permitted by Section 7).
10. Privacy & Confidentiality
10.1 Our handling of personal data is described in the Privacy Policy.
10.2 Each party will treat the other's non-public business, technical, and customer information as confidential and will protect it with at least the same care it uses for its own confidential information, but in no event less than reasonable care. Confidential information includes MarketCheck Data, API keys, account information, pricing, roadmap, and the terms of any custom agreement.
10.3 To the extent MarketCheck processes personal data on your behalf in connection with the Service, the parties will enter into a Data Processing Agreement, the current version of which is available at developers.marketcheck.com/dpa. The Data Processing Agreement is incorporated into these Terms by reference.
11. Disclaimers
THE SERVICE AND MARKETCHECK DATA ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE," WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS, IMPLIED, OR STATUTORY, INCLUDING (WITHOUT LIMITATION) WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, ACCURACY, COMPLETENESS, NON-INFRINGEMENT, OR THAT THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED OR ERROR-FREE. WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT MARKETCHECK DATA IS ACCURATE, COMPLETE, OR SUITABLE FOR ANY PARTICULAR PURPOSE - IT IS COLLECTED FROM PUBLIC, COMMERCIAL, AND PARTNER SOURCES AND MAY CONTAIN ERRORS, OMISSIONS, OR DELAYS.
12. Limitation of Liability
TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, IN NO EVENT WILL MARKETCHECK'S AGGREGATE LIABILITY ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO THESE TERMS, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE), STRICT LIABILITY, OR OTHERWISE, EXCEED THE GREATER OF (a) THE FEES YOU PAID TO MARKETCHECK FOR THE SERVICE IN THE TWELVE (12) MONTHS PRECEDING THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO LIABILITY, OR (b) ONE HUNDRED U.S. DOLLARS (US$100). IN NO EVENT WILL MARKETCHECK BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR LOST PROFITS, LOST DATA, LOSS OF GOODWILL, OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
13. Indemnification
13.1 You will defend, indemnify, and hold harmless MarketCheck, its affiliates, and their respective officers, directors, employees, and agents from and against any third-party claim, loss, damage, liability, settlement, or expense (including reasonable attorneys' fees) arising out of or related to: (a) your breach of these Terms, including the use restrictions in Sections 5–8; (b) your or your Users' use of the Service or MarketCheck Data; (c) any product, service, model, or dataset built on top of the Service; or (d) your violation of any law or third-party right.
13.2 MarketCheck will defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Customer from and against any third-party claim that the Service, as provided by MarketCheck and used in accordance with these Terms, infringes or misappropriates a third party's intellectual property rights, and will pay any resulting settlement or final court-awarded damages. MarketCheck's obligations under this Section do not apply to the extent a claim arises from: (a) Customer's modification of the Service or MarketCheck Data; (b) Customer's combination of the Service with products, data, or services not provided by MarketCheck; (c) Customer's use of the Service in violation of these Terms; or (d) MarketCheck Data sourced from third-party providers under Section 2 that is supplied subject to separate per-provider terms. If MarketCheck believes the Service may become the subject of an infringement claim, MarketCheck may, at its option and expense: (i) procure the right for Customer to continue using the Service; (ii) modify the Service to make it non-infringing; or (iii) if neither (i) nor (ii) is commercially practicable, terminate the affected portion of the Service and refund any prepaid, unused fees.
14. Audit Rights
On reasonable prior notice (and no more often than once per twelve-month period absent reasonable suspicion of breach), MarketCheck may audit your use of the Service to confirm compliance with these Terms, including the restrictions on resale, AI training, caching, and competing-product development. If an audit reveals a material breach, you will reimburse MarketCheck's reasonable and documented costs of the audit, not to exceed $25,000 per audit, and remedy the breach within thirty (30) days.
15. Changes to These Terms
We may update these Terms from time to time. Material changes will be announced via email to the address on your account at least thirty (30) days before the effective date and posted to this page with an updated "Last updated" date. Continued use of the Service after the effective date constitutes acceptance. If you do not agree to the updated Terms, your sole remedy is to cancel your subscription.
16. Governing Law & Disputes
These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-laws principles. Any dispute arising under these Terms will be resolved exclusively in the state or federal courts located in Delaware, and the parties consent to the jurisdiction of those courts. Nothing in this section prevents either party from seeking injunctive or equitable relief in any court of competent jurisdiction to protect its intellectual property or confidential information.
17. Contact
Questions about these Terms: legal@marketcheck.com.
Security incidents: security@marketcheck.com.
Commercial / API questions: api@marketcheck.com.
18. General
18.1 Assignment. You may not assign or transfer these Terms, your account, or any rights or obligations under these Terms, whether by operation of law, merger, change of control, or otherwise, without MarketCheck's prior written consent. Any attempted assignment without consent is void. MarketCheck may assign these Terms or any of its rights or obligations without restriction.
18.2 Force Majeure. Neither party will be liable for any delay or failure to perform its obligations (other than payment obligations) to the extent caused by circumstances beyond its reasonable control, including natural disasters, acts of government, pandemic, war, terrorism, labor disputes, utility or telecommunications failures, or denial-of-service attacks. The affected party will provide prompt notice and use commercially reasonable efforts to mitigate the impact.
18.3 Severability. If any provision of these Terms is held invalid, illegal, or unenforceable by a court of competent jurisdiction, that provision will be enforced to the maximum extent permissible and the remaining provisions will continue in full force and effect.
18.4 Waiver. The failure of either party to enforce any right or provision of these Terms will not constitute a waiver of that right or provision. Any waiver must be in writing and signed by the waiving party.
18.5 Entire Agreement. These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy, the Data Processing Agreement (if applicable), any per-provider data agreements accepted through the developer portal, and any signed Enterprise agreement, constitute the entire agreement between you and MarketCheck regarding the Service and supersede all prior or contemporaneous oral or written communications, proposals, and representations with respect to the Service.
Market Check Cars, Inc. · 169 Madison Ave STE 57434, New York, NY 10016 · Privacy Policy · Data Processing Agreement · Acceptable Use Policy · v1 (archived)