01What the licence lets you do

With an active API subscription we grant you a non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to call the API and use the data it returns inside your own systems and products: your TMS, rate engine, forwarding system, BI stack, quotes, reconciliations and internal tools. You may show a value to your own users as part of your product. What the licence does not include is the right to hand the dataset on as data, which is the next section.

02Attribution

Where a Wharfa value is shown to your end users, the interface must carry the attribution "Charge data by Wharfa", legibly and near the data. This is a condition of the licence, not a courtesy: it's how the people relying on the number know where it came from and who stands behind it. Internal-only use, where no one outside your organisation sees the value, doesn't need visible attribution. White-label arrangements that remove or replace the attribution exist under a separate agreement — see section 09.

03Your key

Your API key authenticates you, so treat it like a password: keep it server-side, don't ship it in a browser, mobile app or public repository, and don't share it across organisations. Everything done with your key is treated as done by you. Tell us at [email protected] the moment a key is exposed and we'll revoke and reissue it. Keys are issued per organisation and may not be transferred to another party.

04What you may not do with the data

You may not republish the dataset, resell access to it, offer it as a feed or bulk export, or use it to build or train a competing reference service, in whole or in any substantial part. The line is the same one the citing page draws: showing a value to your user with attribution is use; re-exposing the values as data someone else can pull is redistribution, and redistribution needs its own agreement. Systematic harvesting of the endpoints to reconstruct the compilation is a breach whether or not it stays inside your rate limit.

05Rate limits and fair use

Keys are rate-limited — 600 requests per minute by default — and subject to a monthly volume aligned to your plan. Go over and you'll get an HTTP 429 with a pointer to upgrade; we don't throttle silently or degrade your data quality. The limit is there to keep the service even for everyone, not to catch you out: if you have a legitimate burst or a higher steady-state need, ask and we'll size a plan to it rather than let you hit the wall.

06Availability and accuracy

The API is provided as-is, on the same footing as the rest of the service: we aim to keep it up and we publish our own lateness on the status page, but we don't promise a percentage, and we don't warrant that any particular value is current at the instant you read it. Where a value drives a commercial decision, the response carries the source snapshot and effective date so you can check it. Responsibility for what you build on the data, and for decisions made with it, stays with you. Nothing here excludes rights that can't be excluded under the Australian Consumer Law.

07When the subscription ends

When your API subscription ends, for whatever reason, the licence ends with it: your keys stop working and the right to use the data stops too. Values you've already written into a specific customer record or a completed transaction can stay there — pulling a live quote back out of an invoice you've already issued helps no one. What you may not do is keep operating a cache of the dataset as if the licence continued. You have 30 days to purge stored Wharfa data from active systems. The prohibition on redistribution outlives the subscription.

08Versioning

The surface is versioned under /v1, and we announce breaking changes at least 90 days ahead. This is a commitment, not a marketing line: we're a reference service and we know what depending on one feels like. Additive, non-breaking changes — new fields, new endpoints — can land without notice, so write your integration to ignore fields it doesn't recognise rather than break on them.

09White-label and enterprise

Removing the attribution, embedding the data in a product you resell, or redistributing under your own brand needs a separate enterprise agreement, which sets the attribution, redistribution and volume terms for that specific arrangement. This isn't a no — it's the conversation those uses need. Start it at [email protected].

10Suspension and changes

We may suspend a key that's putting the service or its users at risk, or that's breaching these terms, and except where we have to act immediately we'll tell you first and give you a chance to fix it. We'll always say why. These terms change as the API does: for material changes we'll give API subscribers at least 30 days' notice, on the same basis as the general terms, and the versioning promise in section 08 protects the interface itself regardless.

Version 1.0. Effective 20 July 2026. Read alongside the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.