Terms of service

metasearch.sh is operated by Paperfoot AI Pte. Ltd. (UEN 202450712K), 32 Pekin Street, #05-01, Singapore 048762 ("Paperfoot", "we"). By creating an account or calling the API you agree to these terms. If you are agreeing on behalf of a company, you confirm you may bind it.

We route your search, scraping, and AI-answer requests to third-party providers, meter what each call costs us, and bill it to your prepaid credit balance at a margin. We are a routing and billing layer. The results come from the providers you name or, if you name none, from the ones we choose for the mode, falling back to the next if one fails. If you leave the mode to us, we choose it, and every choice we make is reported in the response.

Sign-in is by one-time email link. You are responsible for the security of your inbox and of every API key issued to your account. A key can spend your balance; treat it as a credential. Revoke keys you no longer use from the dashboard. Anything done with a valid key is treated as done by you.

One person or organisation per account. Do not resell access, share keys outside your organisation, or create accounts to evade limits or charges.

An organisation owns its balance, its API keys and its usage records. Its owners, and the admins they appoint, decide who has access: they invite members, set each member's role, and can remove a member at any time. Members act for the organisation, and anything a member does with its keys or balance is treated as done by the organisation.

An organisation always has at least one owner. If an owner deletes the organisation, or it closes with the account of its only member, its keys are revoked and any remaining balance closes with it.

Credits are prepaid US dollars bought by card. Each successful request deducts its metered price: the upstream cost multiplied by our published margin, with a small per-request floor. The exact amount charged is returned in every API response and itemised in your dashboard.

Failed and empty calls are not charged. Before a call we reserve its maximum price; whatever the call does not use, including the whole amount for a failed or empty call, returns to your balance automatically.

Credit you buy is non-refundable and has no cash value. It does not expire while your account is open. We refund unused bought credit in three cases: we billed or metered you in error, we close your account without cause, or the law requires it. If you close your account yourself, any remaining balance closes with it.

Credit we add to an account rather than sell, such as a goodwill adjustment, has no cash value and is never refunded.

Promotional credit, such as credit from a promo code, is issued at our discretion. It has no cash value and cannot be transferred or refunded. Each code can be redeemed once per organisation and once per person. Codes can expire, and so can the credit if the offer says so. We may remove promotional credit obtained by abuse, such as through duplicate accounts.

If a card payment is refunded, or a dispute takes the money back, the credit it bought is removed from your balance, and it is restored if the dispute is decided in your favour. We may suspend the account until a dispute is resolved.

Prices can change. We will not change the price of credits you have already bought, but the metered cost of a request follows our current rate card, which tracks what upstream providers charge us.

Automatic top-ups are off until an owner or admin turns them on. By turning them on, you authorise us to charge the saved card the amount you choose whenever the balance falls below the threshold you choose, up to the monthly cap you set. Before you confirm, we show the exact authorisation, such as: “We will charge Visa •••• 4242 $25 when your balance falls below $5, up to $75 a calendar month. Turn it off at any time.”

You can turn automatic top-ups off at any time in Settings under Plan & billing. Removing the saved card turns them off. If a charge fails, we turn them off and email you. Credit bought this way is bought credit, on the terms above.

You agree not to use the service to:

break any applicable law; infringe intellectual property or privacy rights; scrape or extract content you are not permitted to access; circumvent authentication, paywalls, or access controls on a target site; harvest personal data for spam, harassment, or profiling; probe internal or private network addresses; generate load intended to degrade our service or an upstream provider's; or violate the terms of the upstream provider serving your request.

You are responsible for what you search for and what you do with what comes back. Content returned by the service originates on the open web and is not verified by us. Treat it as untrusted input, particularly when feeding it to an autonomous agent.

If a third party makes a claim against us because you broke this section or the law, you will cover our resulting losses, including reasonable legal costs.

We may suspend or terminate an account that breaches this section, and we may do so immediately where the breach risks our access to an upstream provider.

Availability, quality, latency, and coverage depend on third-party providers we do not control. A provider may change its API, reprice, rate-limit, degrade, or disappear. When that happens we will route around it where we can and publish what we know on the status page. We do not guarantee any particular provider remains available.

We do not offer a service level agreement. The service is provided on an as-is, as-available basis. We publish provider status from scheduled checks every 6 hours at metasearch.sh/status.

What we collect, how long we keep it, and how to have it deleted is set out in our privacy policy. In short: your email, your request metadata and query text, and your billing records. We do not sell your data and we do not use your queries to train models.

We own the service, its software, and its documentation. You own your queries and whatever you build with the results. Nothing here grants you rights in the content upstream providers return; those come from the providers and the original publishers.

When you approve an AI assistant, it acts for you: its searches are charged to the organisation you chose, at the same prices as API calls, and are treated as done by you. You need permission to spend that organisation's balance, the same permission that creating a key requires. Revoke the approval in Settings when you no longer want it to search for you.

An assistant reaches every engine an API key reaches except one, which isn't available through assistant connections. The assistant's own terms govern the assistant; these terms govern metasearch.sh. We are not responsible for what an assistant does with the results.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Paperfoot is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages, or for lost profits, revenue, data, or business, arising from your use of the service.

Our total liability for any claim relating to the service is limited to the greater of what you paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose and USD 100. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited under Singapore law.

You may close your account at any time in Settings under Data & privacy, which takes effect at once, or by email to support@paperfoot.com, which we carry out within 30 days. Either way we revoke your keys and anonymise the account, removing your email and other personal data from it. If you are the only owner of an organisation with other members, you transfer ownership first. We keep only the billing records, the ledger and the receipts with the billing details on them, for five years, as Singapore law requires.

We may suspend or terminate an account for breach of these terms, for non-payment, or where required by law. When we terminate an account, its API keys stop working immediately.

We may update these terms. Material changes will be announced by email to account holders and reflected in the effective date above. Continuing to use the service after a change means you accept it.

These terms are governed by the laws of Singapore, and the courts of Singapore have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute.

Questions about these terms: support@paperfoot.com, or by post to Paperfoot AI Pte. Ltd., 32 Pekin Street, #05-01, Singapore 048762.