Terms of service

1. What this service is

DEKA Results API collects Spartan DEKA race results that organisers and their timing providers have already published publicly, reconciles them into one stable data model, and provides programmatic access to that model. It is an independent product. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by Spartan or DEKA, and neither of those names is ours.

2. Accounts and keys

You need an account to hold an API key, and you must give a real email address, because it is how you will be told about anything that affects your integration. One account per person or organisation.

Your API keys are yours to look after. A key is shown once, at creation, and only its hash is stored — so it cannot be recovered, only replaced. Traffic authenticated with your key is treated as yours. If a key leaks, revoke it in the dashboard; that takes effect immediately.

Do not share keys between unrelated products, and do not create several accounts to get around a rate limit. If you need more throughput, ask — it is usually cheaper than you expect and always less work than a workaround.

3. Plans, payment and cancellation

Plans are billed monthly in US dollars through Stripe, and carry a per-minute request limit: Free 20, Starter 30, Pro 60, Scale 180. The limit that applies is shown on your dashboard and returned on every response in the X-RateLimit-Limit header, so your client never has to guess.

You can cancel at any time from the dashboard. Cancelling stops the next renewal and leaves your access running until the end of the period you have already paid for. Because the service bills a month at a time and you can cancel before each renewal, part-months are not refunded as a rule — but if something went genuinely wrong, write to us and it will be sorted out rather than argued about.

Prices can change. Existing subscriptions keep billing at the price they were bought at until you change plan; a price change is never applied retroactively to a running subscription.

4. What you may build

Cache responses, store them, put them in your own database, display them to your users, and charge for the product you build. Attribution is appreciated but not required.

The limits are narrow and specific. You may not:

• Resell or redistribute the dataset itself, in bulk, as a substitute for this API. Building a product on it is fine; republishing it as a competing feed is not.
• Use it to contact, profile or identify athletes as individuals beyond showing their published sporting results, or to combine it with other sources to build personal profiles.
• Attempt to exceed your rate limit by rotating keys, accounts or addresses, or to reach data your plan does not include by any route other than upgrading.
• Present the data in a way that implies Spartan or DEKA endorses your product, or that you are an official source.

Breaking these is grounds for suspending keys. Where a suspension is not urgent you will be told what the problem is and given a chance to fix it first.

5. Where the data comes from, said plainly

This is the term most worth understanding before you build a business on it. The results are published by event organisers and timing providers. We collect them from public pages, politely and identifiably — the crawler policy sets out exactly how. We do not own those results and we do not claim to.

What we license to you is our access service and our data model: the reconciliation, the stable identifiers, the splits and the analysis built on top. If a rights holder asks us to stop carrying something, we will stop, and the API will say so rather than quietly returning less. If an athlete asks for their results to be removed, they are removed.

The practical consequence: treat this as a source that can lose coverage, and do not build something that cannot survive a gap.

6. Availability

The service is provided as it is, with no service level agreement and no uptime guarantee. It runs on a single server. It is monitored and it is looked after, but if you need a contractual availability commitment, it does not exist yet — ask, and we can talk about what it would take.

Endpoints may change. Breaking changes go behind a new API version; the current one is /v1 and it will not be broken underneath you. Additive changes — new fields, new endpoints — can happen at any time, so parse defensively and ignore fields you do not recognise.

7. Liability

The data is provided without warranty of accuracy or completeness. It is reconciled from third-party sources and those sources contain mistakes, which means this API contains them too. Do not use it where an error would cause harm — for prize money, eligibility, qualification or anything with a consequence — without checking against the official result.

To the extent the law allows, liability for any claim arising from this service is limited to what you paid for it in the twelve months before the claim. Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

8. Ending it

You can stop at any time: cancel the plan, revoke the keys, or ask for the account to be deleted and it will be. We can suspend an account for the reasons in section 4, for non-payment, or if we stop operating the service — in which case you get at least 30 days’ notice by email and a refund of any period paid for but not delivered.

9. Law, and changes to these terms

These terms are governed by Belgian law, and the courts of Belgium have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer rather than a business, this does not remove protections that the law of your own country gives you.

If these terms change materially, the date at the top changes and account holders are emailed before it takes effect. Continuing to use the API after that is acceptance; if you would rather not, cancel and you will be refunded for the unused period.

Questions about any of this go to [email protected]. See also the privacy policy.