Usage Fees and Rules

Our services are provided free of charge in allotments of 2500 transactions. All we ask is that you cite us in your work and/or add a link to us on your website.

We throttle the free usage of our services to batches of 2500 records at a time to ensure that all free users get the same level of service given our available computing resources. Users who sign up as partners can process as many records as they like, they just need to re-fill their account by submitting a form from within their account once their balance drops below 2500 records. The details of this procedure are outlined in sections 1) below.

Non-throttled processing options are outlined in sections 2) and 3) below.

If you have questions about any of these usage fees or rules, please feel free to contact us.

Credits and Transactions

The USC WebGIS site keeps track of how much each service is being utilized on a per-user, per-transaction basis. To do this, we maintain a system of credits and transactions. In order to use the services you must have a positive balance of credits associated with your account. Each time you use a service it is considered one transaction and one credit is deducted from your account's balance.

Credit Allocations

When you initially sign up with the USC WebGIS site, you are alloted 2500 credits. If you use all of your credits, you may obtain additional credits in one of three ways:

1) Partner Status Verification and Acceptance

If you are a registered user, you can continue to use the service for free once you have run out of your initial credit allocation by becoming a partner. You must allow us to verify your information by providing us with information about who you are, who your organization is, and what you are using the service for. Becoming a partner means that:

• i) you must add public attribution of our services on your site and any work that is derived from the usage of our services including but not limited to products, services, reports, papers, and/or maps and
• ii) that you agree to have your name and/or logo displayed on our site.

To make a partner request, signup and/or log in and fill out this form. Once you submit the form, you will automatically be granted an additional allocation of credits while we verify your information.

After we recieve your status verification request we will review your submission and attempt to verify your information. We may need to contact you, so please ensure that your contact information is complete, correct, and up-to-date. If we determine that you meet the criteria to qualify as a partner we will notate this on your account and you will be able to obtain future credit authorizations without having to contact us.

2) One-time Purchases

If you are a partner who would rather not have to manually obtain more credits by continually requesting them trhough the site, or you need to process more records than are allocated in batches under the partner program, or you are a user who would just like to donate some money to help improve our services, you can purchase credits online using your credit card or PayPal accounts according to the following payment rates. Once you signup and/or login, you will be able to make your purchases from this payment page.

Payment Rates

From Count	To Count	Transactions Per Cent	Cost Per Transaction	Cost Range
0	10,000	5	$.002	$ - $20
10,001	100,000	5.56	$.0018	$17.99 - $179.86
100,001	1,000,000	6.25	$.0016	$160 - $1,600
1,000,001	10,000,000	7.14	$.0014	$1,400.56 - $14,005.6

3) Service Level Agreements

If you anticipate needing to process a large amount of records for a long period of time for which manually adding credits via the partner forms on the website would not be an acceptable option such as in a scheduled, automated, or web-service type process, we offer service level agreements whereby a user can pay one set price per month and geocode up to a certain amount of records (including unlimited). For information about this option or for a pricing quote, please contact us using the contact form or call Dr. Daniel W. Goldberg directly at 213-740-0521.

A Note About Refunds

We apologize, but we will not be able to provide refunds to customers who make payments to use our services. This policy is in place because we provide our users the ability to process as much data as they wish for free under the terms of the partner program. As such, any and all users have both the ability and ample opportunity to test the quality of our services to ensure that they will meet their particular needs before making any form of purchase. Our services are provided as-is and each individual user is responsible for and advised to determine if our services will meet their specific needs prior to making a payment. For questions or concerns about this policy, please feel free to contact us using the contact form.