Plota API terms

1. What your plan lets you do

Any paid plan licenses you to use Plota data inside your own products and services, including commercial ones. That covers software you sell, tools your customers use, internal systems, CRMs, dashboards, reports, maps, alerts and automated workflows. You don't need Enterprise just because you have customers.

You can store the records you retrieve, keep them in your own systems for as long as you subscribe, and build derived analysis on top of them. Derived analysis you create is yours.

Each record carries a link to the official council register. Keep that link with the record wherever you display one in full, so your users can verify the data at source.

2. What standard plans don't include

A subscription pays for ongoing access to the data. The database itself stays Plota's. On Starter, Pro and Business you may not:

• sell, license or give away raw Plota data as a dataset, whether in bulk or by subscription
• offer a general-purpose planning application API, feed or bulk download service built on Plota data
• systematically retrieve records to assemble a substitute for the Plota database, live or historical
• share keys between organisations, or use multiple accounts to get around plan limits
• collect data from the public Plota website with automated tools; the API is the supported route for software

If your product genuinely needs one of these - bulk delivery, redistribution rights, resale - that's an Enterprise licence. Email us and we'll work it out.

3. The demo tier

The demo tier is free and for evaluation: testing the API shape, building a prototype, checking coverage against your patch. It isn't licensed for production or commercial use.

4. If you cancel

Records already woven into your own work stay yours: entries in your CRM, reports you've produced, completed projects, analysis you've built. We won't ask you to unpick your systems.

What ends with the subscription is access. You can't keep refreshing data, and you can't keep operating a stored bulk copy of Plota data as a database after cancelling.

5. The historical archive

Applications from before 2026 come from the Plota archive and are a paid feature. The same licence applies to archive records as to live ones. Archive records carry a broad, council-based application type rather than Plota's deep classification, and their category is null.

6. Keys, limits and fair use

Your API key is a secret. Don't put it in client-side code, and rotate it from your dashboard if it leaks. You're responsible for requests made with your key.

Rate limits, monthly request quotas and monthly bulk export allowances per plan are on the pricing page; every response carries headers showing where you stand. We review accounts whose usage pattern looks like systematic database retrieval rather than product use, and we'll contact you before acting on anything we see.

7. The data itself

Plota data is drawn from publicly available UK local planning authority records, normalised into one structure and classified by type. It's provided as-is. Councils publish incomplete or inconsistent records, and classification is automated and best-effort - check the council source before acting on a record.

Plota provides data access, not legal or planning advice.

8. Suspension and changes

We can suspend keys that breach these terms. Outside of clear abuse, we'll contact you first and try to fix the problem together.

We may update these terms. Material changes are emailed to active key holders before they take effect.

Effective 12 July 2026. Questions: hello@plota.co.uk. See also the privacy policy and API docs.