Terms of service

Who you are agreeing with

These terms are an agreement between you and [EXACT REGISTERED NAME AS FILED: "Valya AI Corp", "Valya AI Corp." or "Valya AI Corporation"], a Colorado corporation [with its place of business in Sandpoint, Idaho] ("Valya AI", "we", "us", "our"). Permity is the name of the service Valya AI operates[, and a trade name under which Valya AI does business | ; it is a product name, not a separate company]. Where these terms say "Permity" they mean the service, and where they say "we" they mean Valya AI. "You" means the person or company holding the account, or the person buying a single report without one. If you accept for a company, you are confirming that you may bind it, and "you" means that company.

The service

Permity reports the building-permit history of a property address, through a web application, an HTTP API, an MCP server for software agents, and an iOS app. Whichever of those you use, the rules on this page apply: the same limits on the data, the same prices, and the same question before you are charged twice for one property.

What the data is, and is not

Our answers are built from two kinds of source: our primary data feed, which we buy from a commercial provider, and copies of the records that issuing jurisdictions publish, which we collect ourselves. On top of those sources we do work of our own. We resolve the address you typed to a property, match records to it, choose which date to report for each trade, combine records from more than one source, and sometimes infer something (for example, that a system is probably original) and label it as an inference. So a report has two layers, and they carry different limits.

The source records are the jurisdiction’s, not ours. We do not inspect the property, and we do not guarantee that a jurisdiction’s record is accurate, complete, current or correctly coded. Where a source is wrong or late, our answer can be wrong or late.

The matching, the summaries and the inferences are ours. We take care over them, and we say where each one came from, but they are our reading of the records rather than the records themselves, and they can be wrong in ways the source is not: an address can resolve to the wrong property, two records that describe different work can be combined, and an inference is a guess with its basis attached, never a measurement.

Three limits follow, and they are the most important thing on this page.

Unpermitted work does not appear. A roof replaced without a permit leaves no record anywhere in this product. Absence of a permit is not evidence that work was not done. A property showing no permits may have had extensive work.

Not every jurisdiction reports. Where coverage is thin we say so explicitly rather than returning silence that looks like a negative answer. A result marked no_coverage means we know nothing, not that nothing happened.

A date is not always a completion. Every year we return is accompanied by which field it came from. A permit filed in 2012 and work completed in 2012 are different claims, and we distinguish them rather than flattening both to a number.

What we hold is a copy, and it lags. Both sources are refreshed on their own schedules and never in real time. A permit issued this morning may not be in our answer this afternoon, a jurisdiction that stops publishing can leave our copy frozen without our knowing, and a record amended or withdrawn after we copied it may stay as we copied it. The only current record of a property is the jurisdiction’s own.

Permity is not an inspection, a survey, a title search, a lien or encumbrance search, an appraisal, a valuation or a certification of code compliance. It is not engineering, architectural, legal, insurance, tax or investment advice, and nothing in a report is the opinion of a licensed professional. It is one input to a decision that you make and that you own.

Insurance underwriting, and what a report establishes

[COUNSEL: READ THIS BLOCK FIRST. It permits a use, insurance underwriting, that is a listed purpose under 15 U.S.C. § 1681b, and it is written as a limit on what the output establishes rather than as a declaration of our status under the FCRA. Whether the product, as our customers actually use it, is or is not a consumer report is a question this clause does not answer and cannot. The factual sentence about content (a report is about a parcel; we do not identify or evaluate people) is the part we can stand behind; please test it against a real report before you rely on it.]

You may use Permity when pricing, quoting, underwriting, renewing or servicing a property insurance policy. That is what it is built for, and we say so on our pages.

Use it for what it establishes, and no more. A report establishes what the issuing jurisdiction has published about permits at a property, as we matched, combined and summarised it on the day you ran it. It does not establish that work was or was not done, when a roof or any other system was last replaced, the condition of anything at the property, whether the property complies with any code, or anything about a person. Absence of a permit in our data is not evidence that work was not done, and no_coverage is not evidence of anything.

Do not make a Permity report the sole basis for declining, cancelling, non-renewing, surcharging or rating a policy, or for any decision that a law, a regulator or your own standards require to be supported by an inspection or by verified property characteristics. Where a decision needs more than a report establishes, the rest is yours to obtain, and the decision is yours.

A report is about a parcel, not a person. We do not identify owners or occupants, we do not evaluate anyone, and a report is not assembled to bear on any individual’s creditworthiness, character, general reputation, personal characteristics or mode of living. Do not use the service to decide whether an individual is eligible for credit, employment, housing, a licence or any other benefit, and do not use it as a factor in an adverse action against an individual. Do not use the service in a way that would make a report a consumer report in your hands under the Fair Credit Reporting Act or a state equivalent, except under a separate written agreement with us that provides for that use. If you do so without one, you carry every obligation that follows, including any notice you owe a person, and the indemnity below applies. These terms are not that agreement.

What you may use it for, and what you may not

Look up properties you have a legitimate business reason to look up: a property you are insuring, underwriting, quoting, buying, selling, servicing, inspecting or managing, and properties on a list you already hold for one of those reasons.

Contractors. A permit record sometimes carries an identifier for the party that pulled the permit. Where it appears it is an identifier, not a name, and it does not establish who performed particular work, the quality of that work, or whether anyone was negligent. Do not use it to evaluate a contractor or any other person.

Claims. Do not offer the absence of a permit in our data as evidence that work was not done, was not permitted, or was done badly, and do not present a report as proof of any of those things in a claim, a coverage dispute or a legal proceeding. Watching a property while a claim is open is fine; drawing that inference from it is not. Nothing here stops you producing a report, intact, where a court, a regulator or a law requires it.

Lending. Do not use a report to originate, price, underwrite, securitise or service a loan, to decide whether a property is adequate collateral, or in an appraisal delivered to a lender.

Professional negligence. Do not use a report to establish, defend or apportion whether an agent, broker, inspector, contractor or other professional failed to discover, disclose or act on work at a property. Absence in our data is not absence of a permit, and absence of a permit is not absence of work.

Do not use Permity to harass, profile or locate an individual; to build a competing permit database by bulk extraction; to resell or redistribute the underlying records as a dataset; or to work around a rate limit, an allowance, or a jurisdiction’s own terms. You may use API output inside your own systems and you may share an intact report; the section on sharing says how.

This list is what we have thought of. It is not exhaustive. If your use depends on our data being complete, current or independently verified, it is out of scope here, and the right answer is a separate written agreement, not these terms.

Reporting a wrong match

If a report matches the wrong property, attributes a permit to the wrong address, combines records that do not belong together, or summarises a record in a way you believe is wrong, tell us at nate@valyaai.us and quote the request id printed on the report. We will review it within [ten] business days, tell you what we found, and correct what is ours to correct: our matching, our summary or our inference. We cannot change a jurisdiction’s record. Where the source is wrong we will say so, and where the jurisdiction offers a way to correct it we will point you to it. A lookup that returned the wrong property because of our error is not charged, and if it was, the charge is returned.

Your API key

Your key is your responsibility. Anything done with it counts as done by you until you tell us it is exposed and we revoke it, unless the exposure was caused by us. Keys are shown once and stored only as a digest, so a lost key is replaced rather than recovered. Tell us promptly if one is exposed and we will revoke it. Every key on an account spends from the same allowance.

Billing

Subscriptions carry an included allowance of lookups, and the allowance is monthly on every plan. You can pay monthly or a year at a time; paying yearly costs 15% less and buys twelve monthly allowances, not one large one. Once your allowance and any credits are used, lookups pause until the allowance resets or you add credits. Nothing is charged beyond your allowance unless you buy it.

What a lookup is. A lookup is one property, answered: we identified the property you asked about and reported what we hold for it. An answer that the property has no permits on record is an answer, it is often the one you were buying, and it costs a full lookup. So does an answer that the jurisdiction does not report to us (no_coverage). That is not evidence about the property; it is the cost of the search, and we would rather say so here than at the charge.

Opening a report you already have is free. Running a lookup again is charged. Every lookup you run counts against your allowance, however recently you ran the same property, and whether or not the answer turns out to have changed. Reports stay retrievable for their full 90 days and opening one costs nothing, ever.

We ask before charging you twice for the same property. When you run a property this account has run in the last 30 days, we tell you first: when you ran it, whether we can tell that anything has been published since, a link to the report you already have, and what running it again would cost. That is a question, not a charge, and asking is free. Saying yes, in whichever interface you are using (the web app, the API, the MCP server or the iOS app), is your consent to be charged for that run. It is consent for that property and that run only. A re-run costs one lookup, from your monthly allowance if any remains and otherwise from your credits; the prompt says which we expect, and the response says what was actually taken.

We can only ask when we already know which property you mean. If the address you sent has to be resolved afresh before we can tell whether you have run it, the lookup runs and is charged, because finding out would itself cost us a paid call. On the API, your request says whether you want to be asked (on_repeat: "prompt"); a request that does not ask is run and charged, because a client that is not listening cannot answer. On the MCP server the agent is asked, and it must pass our confirmation back to run again. A batch and a watch never ask, for the reasons below.

Retries. The API accepts an Idempotency-Key. A request repeated with the same key and the same body within 24 hours returns the original answer and is not charged again. A request repeated without one is a new lookup and is charged, because we cannot tell a retry from a fresh ask.

A batch runs every row and charges every row. Uploading a file does not reuse answers from an earlier run, and nobody is asked before a row runs, so addresses you have run before will be run again and charged again, including addresses that repeat within the file.

A watch is a standing instruction to keep looking. Creating a watch runs a lookup and is charged as one. Each scheduled check that identifies the property is a lookup and is charged as one, every time it runs, and a watch is never asked first. When there is nothing left to spend, checks are skipped rather than charged, and resume when there is. A watch whose property we cannot identify on three checks in a row is switched off, and we tell you; a failure on our side does not count towards that, and adding the address again turns the watch back on.

A street comparison is its own answer and its own lookup. Comparing a property to its block is a different question from what permits the property has, and it is charged separately from the property’s lookup.

Two failed lookups cost one lookup between them. A failure is an address we could not identify, or one that matched several properties and left you to choose. The first failure in a pair takes nothing from your allowance and the second takes one lookup for both. This is not a half credit you can spend: it is a whole lookup, deducted on the second failure, and an odd failure carries over, into the next month and through a cancellation, until it is paired. If the fault is ours (our systems, or a data provider, were unavailable) you are charged nothing and the failure is not counted.

An annual subscription is billed in full on the day you buy it, and it is not refundable. Not in part, not pro-rated, not for months you did not use. If that is not a bet you want to make, pay monthly: the price is the only difference.

Cancel any time through the billing portal. Cancelling stops the next renewal; it does not end the period you have already paid for and does not return money for it. A monthly plan runs to the end of its month, an annual plan to the end of its year, and the lookups stay available until then.

If a payment fails, lookups stop and reports do not. Every report generated while you were paying stays retrievable for its full 90 days. We think revoking work you already paid for is the wrong way to collect a debt.

Credit packs are lookups bought once, at the price shown, charged in full when bought. They are spent only after the month’s allowance and do not reset with it. They are good for twelve months from purchase and are then forfeited. They are not refundable once any credit from the pack has been used; an unused pack can be refunded on request within fourteen days. Unused credits are not refunded when a subscription is cancelled; they stay on the account for their twelve months and can be spent again if the subscription is restarted.

Charges we got wrong are returned. If we charge you for something this page says is free, or for a failure that was ours, tell us and we return it: to your allowance or your credits, whichever it came from, or to your card where that is where it came from. That is owed in full, and nothing in the liability section limits it.

There is no free tier and no trial allowance. An account with no subscription can sign in and read its reports, but cannot spend a lookup: every lookup costs us money at a data provider, and we would rather charge for it than pretend it is free.

Buying one report without an account

You can buy one report for one property, at the price shown, without an account. It is a purchase rather than an allowance: it is charged once, when you buy it, and buying the same report twice is charged twice, because without an account we hold no record of what you have run and cannot ask you first. If we cannot produce the report, you are not charged. If we deliver a report for the wrong property, we refund the purchase, and that refund is your remedy for a single report; it is not limited by the liability section. A report bought this way is delivered by a signed link that expires, and it is retained for 90 days like every other report. Everything on this page about what the data is and is not, and about what a report establishes, applies to it. The indemnity below does not apply to a report bought for personal, family or household use. The limits on our liability apply to such a purchase only to the extent the law allows, and nothing in these terms takes away a right you have under consumer-protection law that cannot be limited by agreement.

Reports you share

You may share a report you have generated, intact, by its signed link or by email, with anyone you have a legitimate reason to show it to, and you may use API output inside your own systems. What you may not do is alter a report, strip it of its limitations, or redistribute the underlying records as a dataset. If you quote or summarise a report, carry its limits with it: which field a date came from, what no_coverage means, and that unpermitted work does not appear.

Forwarding a report does not make the person who opens it a party to these terms, and does not bind them to anything on this page. Every report carries, on every page, the same statement about unpermitted work that appears here, so a reader who never agreed to anything still sees the limit. You are responsible for what you send, to whom, and for what you say about it. You are not responsible for what an independent recipient chooses to do on their own, unless you sent it for a use this page prohibits or misdescribed what it establishes.

A signed link expires seven days after it is issued. The report behind it is retained for 90 days from generation and then deleted. A copy someone has downloaded is outside our control, and we cannot promise to delete it.

Availability

We depend on upstream data providers and do not promise uninterrupted service. When upstream data is unavailable we return a distinct error rather than a confident wrong answer, and that error is not charged.

No warranty

THE SERVICE, EVERY REPORT, AND ALL DATA IN THEM ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE", WITH ALL FAULTS AND WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW WE DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED AND STATUTORY, INCLUDING THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT, AND ANY WARRANTY ARISING FROM A COURSE OF DEALING OR A USAGE OF TRADE.

In particular, we do not warrant that the data is accurate, complete, current or free from error, that a property’s permit history is fully represented, that any jurisdiction’s records have been received or are up to date, that our matching, summaries or inferences are correct, that the service will be uninterrupted, or that results will meet your requirements or any standard that applies to your profession or licence. No information you get from us, in any form or from any person, creates a warranty we have not given here. This disclaimer does not cancel the specific promises this page makes about prices, refunds and the return of charges we got wrong.

Some states do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties or the limitation of certain damages. Where that is so, the exclusions and limits in these terms apply to the fullest extent permitted, and nothing here limits a right you have that cannot be limited by agreement.

Limit of our liability

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, WE ARE NOT LIABLE FOR INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR LOST PROFITS, LOST REVENUE, LOST BUSINESS, LOSS OF GOODWILL, LOSS OF DATA, UNDERWRITING LOSSES, RESERVE OR PRICING DEFICIENCIES, CLAIMS PAID OR DENIED, OR REGULATORY FINES OR PENALTIES, HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER OR NOT WE WERE TOLD SUCH DAMAGES WERE POSSIBLE.

OUR TOTAL LIABILITY TO YOU FOR ALL CLAIMS ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THE SERVICE, TAKEN TOGETHER, WILL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF (A) THE FEES YOU PAID US IN THE TWELVE MONTHS BEFORE THE FIRST EVENT GIVING RISE TO A CLAIM AND (B) ONE HUNDRED US DOLLARS. That is one aggregate cap across every claim you may have, not a cap for each one, and it applies whatever the theory: contract, tort, negligence, misrepresentation, statute or anything else.

Neither the exclusions nor the cap above applies to our fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, our wilful misconduct, our wilful and wanton or grossly negligent conduct, our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, or anything else the law does not permit us to limit. Nor do they apply to money this page says we will give back: a refund we promised, a charge we got wrong, and the price of a single report delivered for the wrong property are owed in full, and they are not damages.

These limits are a basic part of the bargain between us. The price reflects them, and without them the service would not be offered at this price.

Your indemnity

This section is for business use of Permity. It does not apply to a report bought for personal, family or household purposes.

You will defend, indemnify and hold harmless Valya AI and its officers, employees and contractors against a claim, demand or proceeding brought by someone else, and against the resulting losses, liabilities, damages, penalties and reasonable legal fees and costs, to the extent the claim is caused by:

(a) your use of Permity for a use this page prohibits, or your material breach of these terms;
(b) your use of the service in breach of a law governing how property or personal information may be used, including the Fair Credit Reporting Act and its state equivalents;
(c) your alteration of a report, your removal of its limitations, or a statement you made about what a report establishes that the report does not establish; or
(d) use of an API key issued to your account by a person you gave it to or allowed to keep it, except where the exposure was caused by us.

It does not apply to the extent a claim is caused by our own breach of these terms, our negligence or our other misconduct, and where fault is shared it is shared. Making a decision in reliance on a report, or sharing an intact report as this page permits, does not by itself bring this section into play.

We will tell you promptly about a claim we want indemnified, give you control of its defence with counsel we reasonably approve, and cooperate at your expense. You will not settle anything that admits fault on our part, imposes an obligation on us, or does not fully release us, without our written agreement. Reasonable defence costs count towards what you owe under this section rather than sitting on top of it.

Suspension, and closing an account

We may suspend or close an account for non-payment, for a use this page prohibits, for a risk to the service or to a jurisdiction’s own systems, or where a law requires it. Except where waiting would make things worse, we tell you first, say why, and where the cause can be fixed we give you a chance to fix it. You can close your account at any time.

Suspension or closure for cause does not return prepaid fees. If we close an account for our own convenience rather than for cause, we return the unused part of a prepaid period. Either way, reports you have already generated stay retrievable for their 90 days, and you keep access to read and download them.

What survives the end of your account: everything on this page about what the data is and is not, about what a report establishes, and about reports you have shared; the warranty disclaimer; the limit of our liability; your indemnity; any fees you owe; and the governing law and venue below.

Accepting these terms, and changing them

You accept these terms when you create an account, when you buy a report, a subscription or a pack of credits, and when someone with authority to bind your account accepts a new version in the app. Every acceptance is recorded against the version you were shown, and that version is the date printed at the top of this page.

When we change these terms in substance we publish a new version, keep the old one reproducible, and give notice by email to the account contact and in the app. A new version applies to a new purchase immediately. For everything else it takes effect [thirty] days after we give notice, or when you accept it, whichever comes first.

Using the API does not accept a new version and no key stops working because one was published. During the notice period our responses carry the version you last accepted, the current version and the date the period ends, so your logs see it before anyone has to. Anyone with authority on your account can accept in the app, which ends the notices.

If you have paid for a period in advance and have not accepted a new version: [TRANSITION FOR EXISTING ACCOUNTS: whether the terms you accepted govern the rest of the prepaid period, or the account is held at the end of the notice period, and what happens to an annual subscriber mid-term. Not a legal safe harbor either way, and prepaid value has to be protected or refunded].

Governing law, and where a dispute goes

These terms are governed by the law of [GOVERNING LAW: Colorado, the state of incorporation, or Idaho, the place of business], without regard to its conflict-of-law rules.

[VENUE: the county whose state courts, and the federal judicial district, that will hear a dispute. Jefferson County, Colorado was drafted and has no known connection to this business; Bonner County, Idaho is where the business sits; the Colorado registered-office county is not on record with us. Name the federal district separately from the county]. Nothing in this section takes away a right you have under a consumer-protection law that cannot be given up by agreement, or the remedies that law provides.

If you have signed a separate written agreement with us, that agreement controls wherever it differs from this page. If any part of these terms is unenforceable, it is limited to the minimum extent necessary and the rest stands. A right we do not enforce straight away is not a right we have given up. You may not transfer your account without our agreement; we may transfer these terms to a successor to the business.

Contact

nate@valyaai.us, for a question about these terms, a wrong match, a charge, or notice of anything this page says to tell us about.

Legal notices to us: [POSTAL ADDRESS FOR LEGAL NOTICES, or the deliberate decision to publish none]. Notices to you go to the account contact address we hold, and for a purchase without an account, to the address you bought it with.