Terms of Service

1. The Basics

These terms are an agreement between you and Hobby Card Index ("HCI", "we") covering your use of hobbycardindex.com and its apps and APIs. By creating an account or using the service, you agree to them. If you don't agree, don't use the service.

2. Who Can Use HCI

You must be at least 13 years old to use Hobby Card Index. If you're under the age where you can legally agree to these terms where you live, a parent or guardian must agree for you.

3. Your Account

• Give us accurate information when you sign up, and keep it current.
• Keep your password and login credentials to yourself. You're responsible for activity that happens under your account.
• One person per account. Team seats on Dealer and Enterprise plans get their own logins.
• Tell us right away at support@hobbycardindex.com if you think your account has been compromised.
• Accounts made through an AI assistant. An AI assistant or other software can buy a plan for you through our checkout at hobbycardindex.com/api/v1/agent without signing in: Pro, Dealer or Enterprise, monthly, or a Commercial API plan (Lite, Growth Lite or Growth). The plan and the account belong to the person or company whose email is given at checkout. Paying on the checkout page means you accept these terms for that person or company, including section 8 for a Commercial plan, and whoever uses the assistant to buy confirms they're allowed to. We create the account on that email when the payment goes through, and the plan bills and renews like any other, as section 5 describes. For a Commercial plan or Enterprise, the API key is shown once on the page after checkout. Keep it private, and if it's lost, sign in with Forgot password on the same email and make a new one. You're responsible for everything done with your account and key, including by your assistant. An email that already has an account buys in Settings instead.

4. Acceptable Use

Don't abuse the service. Specifically, you agree not to:

• Scrape, crawl, or bulk-extract data from the site or APIs, or use automated tools to do what the app does manually
• Resell, republish, or redistribute pricing data or other content from the service, or show it to your customers or the public, unless you have a commercial plan (see section 8)
• Circumvent rate limits, scan limits, subscription tiers, or other technical controls
• Probe, attack, or attempt to gain unauthorized access to the service or other users' accounts
• Upload anything illegal, infringing, or malicious
• Use the service to break any law, or to violate the terms of connected services (for example, eBay's policies when you list through our dealer tools)

We can suspend or terminate accounts that violate these rules. Where practical we'll warn you first, but serious abuse can mean immediate suspension.

5. Subscriptions & Billing

• HCI has a free tier and paid tiers (Pro, Dealer, Enterprise), billed monthly or annually.
• Payments are processed by Stripe. We never see or store your card number.
• Paid plans renew automatically at the end of each billing period until you cancel.
• You can cancel anytime from your account's billing settings.
• Monthly plans: cancelling ends your plan at the end of the current month. You keep access until then. Monthly payments are not refunded.
• Annual plans: an annual plan is paid for the whole year up front. Cancelling stops it from renewing, and you keep access until the end of that year. Unused months are not refunded, except where the law requires it or under the 14-day rule below.
• 14 days to cancel an annual plan: any plan bought for a year, personal or commercial, can be cancelled for a full refund within 14 days of buying it, as long as you haven't started using it. Signing in to the account after buying, running a scan, making an API call, or using any feature of the plan counts as using it, and ends this 14-day right. To cancel under this rule, email support@hobbycardindex.com within the 14 days. Monthly plans aren't covered, and their free trial doesn't apply to annual plans.
• If we change prices, the new price applies from your next renewal, and we'll tell you before it does.
• Feature limits (like monthly scan counts) vary by tier and are shown on the pricing page.
• Commercial API plans are billed as section 8 describes, and their own rules on terms, cancelling and refunds apply.

6. Pricing Data Is Informational — Not Financial Advice

7. Your Content and Our Content

Yours: You own the content you put into HCI — your collection data, card photos and scans, dealer inventory, notes. You give us permission to store, process, and display that content as needed to run the service for you (for example, sending a card photo to our identification provider, or backing up your collection). That permission ends when the content is deleted.

Ours: The HCI software, design, branding, and the databases and analytics we've built belong to Hobby Card Index. These terms don't give you any right to copy, resell, or build competing products from them.

Our data: the prices, sold sales, market data, card records, card identifications and bulk price files the service provides ("HCI Data") are licensed to you, not sold. Section 8 covers what that license lets you do.

8. Using Our Data: Your License and Commercial Use

What every plan includes. While your account is in good standing, we give you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license to use HCI Data for your own purposes: tracking and valuing your own collection, pricing your own inventory, your own buying and selling decisions, and internal reports and tools used only by you or your team. This applies to data you see in the app and to data you get through exports, the API, or bulk downloads on the Enterprise plan. Setting your own price on a card using HCI Data counts as your own use.

What needs a commercial plan. You need a commercial plan (our Commercial Data License) before you:

• Show HCI Data to your customers or the public, for example on a website, app, marketplace, widget, stream overlay, point-of-sale screen, printed price list or price guide
• Resell, sublicense, rent, or redistribute HCI Data, including API responses and bulk price files
• Use HCI Data to build or train a price guide, database, or AI model that you sell or make available to others. This never covers card recognition: see Card recognition below.
• Include HCI Data in a product or service you charge for
• Share your API key, exports, or bulk files with another person or company

An Enterprise plan on its own gives you internal-use rights only, with no commercial rights. Individual sold-sale records through the API are available only on a commercial plan that includes them.

How to get one. The commercial plans and their prices are listed at hobbycardindex.com/developers#commercial-plans: a free setup month, which you apply for in Settings, API Access, plus three sizes, Lite, Growth Lite and Growth, which you can buy by card in Settings, API Access or through our checkout for AI assistants (section 3). Platform and custom volume are arranged with us in writing at sean@hobbycardindex.com. Buying a plan in Settings, buying one through our checkout for AI assistants, starting a setup month, or signing a written agreement with us gives you a Commercial Data License on the terms in this section. By agreeing to them, you accept them for the person or company the account belongs to. If a signed agreement says something different, the signed agreement wins.

The setup month. The setup month is free for 30 days so you can build and test your integration before you launch. You apply for it in Settings, API Access, on the size you mean to take (Lite, Growth Lite or Growth), and once we approve it, you start it there by adding a card. It has daily limits and a fixed number of sold-sale lookups for the whole month, all shown in Settings. When the 30 days end, that plan starts and its first month is charged to your card that day. If you are ready sooner, you can start that plan early in Settings, API Access: it starts, and its first month is charged to your card, on the day you start it. That day of the month is your billing date from then on: each month's price is charged to your card on it, in advance. The setup month comes with that first paid month: the plan can't be cancelled until the first month has been charged, and after that it is month to month like any other plan. You get one setup month per person or company, ever. Opening extra accounts, using other email addresses, or sharing setup months between companies to get more breaks these terms. We may end a setup month early if it is used for anything other than building and testing.

Prices. On a commercial plan you may store the current prices and price history you get through the API or bulk files, and use them in your product, for example in charts, collection values and your own estimates, for as long as your plan is active.

Card recognition. Recognizing cards from photos is done by our scan, on every plan. You may show our identifications to your users, but you may not use HCI Data to recognize cards yourself in place of the scan. That includes building or training a card recognition system or AI model from HCI Data, and pairing our identifications with photos, image fingerprints or embeddings so new photos can be matched without the scan, whether the photos are yours, your users' or anyone else's.

Sold-sale records. Each sale's price, date, grade and listing title is a sold-sale record.

• Sold-sale records come only through the API, one card per call, and only on plans that include them. Each plan has a monthly number of card lookups, and lookups are paid for in advance: a month's lookups open when that month is paid.
• Each lookup returns up to 100 sales in each grade for that card in the period you ask for. More sales per lookup are available by written agreement with us, at an added cost.
• There is no bulk download of sold-sale records on any plan, including Enterprise and Platform. Bulk price files contain current prices, not individual sales.
• You may store the sold-sale records you get through the API and use them in your product, for example to show a card's sales to your users and to calculate the values you show them, for as long as your plan is active. Refresh them as needed so what your users see stays accurate, and keep only the records your product uses.
• You may not use sold-sale records to build a standalone database of card sales that works apart from your product, copy all of our sales or all the sales for a category, offer them as a download, or resell or pass them to anyone else. Don't use them to build or train an AI model, and don't scrape our site or app to collect them.

Paying for a commercial plan.

• Every commercial plan is paid by card through Stripe, monthly in advance, and renews automatically on your billing date: the day your free setup month ended, or the day you bought the plan. Platform and custom plans are paid by card too, on the dates in your written agreement. We don't bill by invoice. Keep a valid card on file; you can update it any time in Settings, API Access (Billing).
• Every size is month to month, with no minimum term, except that a plan started with a setup month is charged for at least its first month. Cancel any time in Settings, API Access. The plan stays on until the end of the month you have paid for.
• You can change size in Settings, API Access. A bigger size starts straight away: you pay the difference for the rest of the month at once, and its extra sold-sale lookups for that part of the month open when that payment is made. A smaller size starts when the month you have paid for ends, at the smaller size's price. During a setup month you can change size at no charge, up or down, as often as you like. The free month and its limits stay as they are, and the first charge is the price of the size you are on when it ends.
• Lite, Growth Lite and Growth can go past their monthly requests and photo scans, up to three times their numbers, once you turn on extra calls in Settings, API Access (they are off until you do, and you can turn them off at any time): Lite at $1 per 250 extra calls, Growth Lite at $1 per 500 and Growth at $1 per 1,000. The extra is charged to your card early the next month, or right away if you reach three times your plan's numbers before the month ends. If that charge doesn't go through, the plan stops at its monthly numbers until it is paid. A Lite or Growth Lite plan running on terms you accepted before October 27, 2026 keeps stopping at its monthly numbers until you accept these terms in Settings, API Access. Sold-sale, cert and pop lookups stop at their monthly numbers on every plan. Platform and custom plans can go over at the rate in your agreement.
• While a commercial plan is running, or any amount for it is unpaid, the cards on your account stay on file. You can add a card at any time, and the newest one is the card charged, but cards can't be removed until the plan has ended and everything is paid. An account with an unpaid amount can't be deleted until it is paid. Prepaid cards are not accepted.
• Every size includes a monthly number of cert lookups, shown in Settings, API Access. Pop reports, with a larger number of cert lookups, are an add-on to Lite, Growth Lite or Growth, with its own monthly price and its own monthly numbers of pop reports and cert lookups, all shown in Settings, API Access, where it is bought by card. The add-on rides on the plan it was added to: it is month to month and ends when that plan ends. Platform and the setup month include them, each with its own monthly number of pop reports.
• The daily price files, which hold the current prices of every card in a category in a file rebuilt each day, are an add-on to Growth Lite or Growth, with their own monthly price shown in Settings, API Access, where they are bought by card. Like the other add-on, they are month to month and end when the plan ends. Platform includes them. They are not available on Lite or during a setup month.
• Commercial plan payments are not refunded, including when a plan is ended for breaking these terms, except a plan bought for a year and cancelled under the 14-day rule in section 5.
• If a charge to your card fails, Stripe retries it and your API key keeps working for 7 days from the billing date. If it is still unpaid after those 7 days, API calls stop until a payment goes through; your plan and its billing date stay as they were, and a successful payment switches it back on. If a payment is reversed or disputed, we switch the plan off straight away, and it stays off.
• We may change commercial prices and limits with 30 days' notice by email. A change applies from your next billing date.

Credit. Every commercial plan asks for one link back to hobbycardindex.com somewhere on your website, on any page, such as "Prices and API supplied by Hobby Card Index". It does not need to be beside the prices or on your main page.

When your plan or license ends. Stop using HCI Data you got through exports, the API or bulk downloads, and delete any stored copies (including cached API responses, sold-sale records and bulk files) within 30 days. If we ask, confirm in writing that you have. Your own collection data, notes and photos are yours to keep.

Enforcement. We monitor API and export usage. If HCI Data is used outside these terms, for example by getting around limits with extra accounts or keys, sharing keys, collecting sold-sale records in bulk, or scraping the website or app, we may suspend API keys, plans or accounts without a refund and seek any other remedy the law allows.

9. Third-Party Services

Parts of HCI rely on third parties — Stripe for payments, eBay for live listing data and dealer listing tools, Google for card identification. Your use of those services through HCI is also subject to their own terms. We aren't responsible for third-party services being available or accurate.

10. Service Availability & Changes

We work to keep HCI fast and available, but the service is provided "as is" — we don't promise it will be uninterrupted or error-free. We may add, change, or remove features over time. If we ever discontinue the service, we'll give you reasonable notice so you can export your data.

11. Limits on Our Liability

To the fullest extent the law allows: we are not liable for indirect or consequential damages (like lost profits or lost data), and our total liability for any claim related to the service is capped at the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim — or $50 if you're on the free tier. Some places don't allow these limits, in which case they apply only as far as local law permits.

12. Ending Things

You can stop using HCI and delete your account at any time — see Data Deletion for how. We can suspend or terminate your account if you violate these terms. If we terminate without cause, we'll refund the unused portion of any prepaid period.

13. Governing Law and Dispute Resolution

13.1 Governing Law. These terms are governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the Province of British Columbia and the federal laws of Canada applicable therein, without regard to conflict-of-law principles.

13.2 Informal Resolution First. Most disputes can be resolved without a formal proceeding. Before starting arbitration or going to court, you agree to first contact us at legal@hobbycardindex.com and give us at least 30 days to resolve the dispute informally and in good faith.

13.3 Binding Individual Arbitration (U.S. users). If you are located in the United States, then except for the carve-outs in Section 13.5, you and Hobby Card Index agree that any dispute arising out of or relating to these terms or the service will be resolved by final and binding individual arbitration, rather than in court. Arbitration will be administered by the American Arbitration Association (AAA) under its Consumer Arbitration Rules, and may be conducted by phone, by video, or in writing where the rules allow, so you do not have to travel. Judgment on the award may be entered in any court of competent jurisdiction.

13.4 Class-Action Waiver (U.S. users). To the fullest extent permitted by law, disputes will be brought only in your individual capacity, and not as a plaintiff or class member in any class, collective, consolidated, or representative proceeding. The arbitrator may not consolidate more than one person’s claims or preside over any form of class proceeding. If this class-action waiver is found unenforceable as to a particular claim, that claim (and only that claim) will proceed in court rather than arbitration.

13.5 Carve-Outs. Either party may bring an individual claim in small-claims court, and either party may seek injunctive or other equitable relief in court to protect its intellectual property or stop unauthorized use of the service. Nothing in Sections 13.3–13.4 applies where, or to anyone for whom, such arbitration or class-action waiver is prohibited or unenforceable under applicable law.

13.6 30-Day Opt-Out. You may opt out of the arbitration and class-action-waiver provisions (Sections 13.3–13.4) by emailing legal@hobbycardindex.com within 30 days of first accepting these terms, stating your name and that you opt out of arbitration. Opting out will not affect any other part of these terms.

13.7 Other Users; Courts. For users not subject to Section 13.3, and for any dispute not resolved by arbitration, the courts located in British Columbia, Canada will have exclusive jurisdiction, and you submit to the jurisdiction of those courts. To the extent any dispute proceeds in court rather than arbitration, you and Hobby Card Index waive any right to a jury trial.

13.8 Your Consumer Rights Survive. Nothing in these terms limits any non-waivable rights you may have as a consumer under the laws of British Columbia (including the Business Practices and Consumer Protection Act) or under the mandatory consumer-protection laws of your own country, province, or state, to the extent they cannot be excluded by agreement.

14. Changes to These Terms

If we change these terms, we'll post the updated version on this page and update the effective date at the top. For significant changes, we'll make the update visible in the app or by email. Continuing to use HCI after a change means you accept the new terms.

15. Contact

Questions about these terms: support@hobbycardindex.com