Terms of service

Also: Neutrality · Privacy · Copyright · Tester terms

Version 1.7, effective 2026-10-13. Adopted by Sparks & Sawdust LLC. MODEL-70.

1. Who you are contracting with

The ModelSpec API and the modelspec.dev and benchgraph.dev sites are operated by Sparks & Sawdust LLC ("we", "us"). "You" is whoever calls the service, including an autonomous agent calling it on somebody's behalf. An agent that accepts these terms binds the person or organisation it acts for.

2. What the service is

ModelSpec catalogues AI models and ranks them against a published method. The service is:

The site at https://modelspec.dev. A person looking things up by hand gets current data, free, at a rate limit. The ranking policy and the neutrality commitment are also published as static JSON, with no key and no account (§4).
The API at https://api.modelspec.dev: POST /v1/rank, which computes a ranking per request from that same published export; POST /v1/policy-check, which checks models, and the platforms that serve them, against a policy you state; GET /v1/health; and GET /v1/credits, which reports a key's credit balance.
A remote MCP server at https://api.modelspec.dev/mcp, which offers the same answers as tools and passes each call through to the API or the export.
API keys. A key beginning live_ identifies a caller and its tier. A key beginning test_ is a sandbox key: it is answered with synthetic results, not live data, and is never stored. Whether a call must carry a key, and the limits of each tier, are published at https://modelspec.dev/auth.md and https://modelspec.dev/pricing. Machine access is a paid product: a request for an answer from the API or the MCP server without a key is refused, with a message saying where to get one. The decide page on modelspec.dev stays free for a person looking things up by hand.
Paid access, metered in credits and bought through Stripe or by x402 (§6). A key with credits remaining receives the paid answer, which includes our commercial-use and data-residency determinations on policy-check. A key with none left receives an HTTP 402 response that offers the credit packs for payment by x402. That response is not charged (§6.3).

Credits can also be bought by x402: a payment in USDC on the Base network, made by your software in reply to an HTTP 402 response (§6). We will not bill you under terms you did not see first.

What the service is not. We do not run inference. We do not proxy, relay or resell access to any model, and your prompts and inference traffic do not pass through us (§4, §7). We are not your agent, your broker or your advisor, and a ranking is information, not a recommendation to enter any transaction.

3. The honest-broker rule

This is the rule the rest of these terms exist to keep, and it is the reason we will never sell the thing a ranking is worth most to the people it ranks:

Charging the consumer of a recommendation is compatible with being an honest broker. Charging the subjects of one is not.

We charge the consumer of a recommendation. We do not charge its subjects.

4. The neutrality commitment

No referral fees, no paid placement, no provider-paid visibility, permanently.

No model provider, hosting platform, gateway, inference vendor or other subject of a ranking can pay us for a better position, for inclusion, for visibility, or for anything else that touches what an answer says. There is no rate card for this, because there is no price at which it is for sale.

Neutrality does not stop at money. No provider, gateway, hosting route or inference vendor is privileged at any stage of a recommendation: not in the ranking, not in the tie-breaks, not in a default hosting suggestion, and not by any commercial relationship of ours.

We also do not earn on your inference. We recommend and hand off: your calls to a provider, gateway or local runtime go there directly and never through us. A margin that grows with your token volume would be a reason to steer you, so we have arranged not to have one.

This commitment is machine-readable. It is published as the neutrality block of the ranking policy, in the same object as the ranking floors, at https://modelspec.dev/api/rank/profiles.json, and in the policy block of every rank response. It is fetchable with no key and no account, so you can check it rather than trust it. The ranking method itself (api/ranking/engine.py) is public for the same reason.

If we ever break this commitment, the JSON says so before the prose does.

5. Using the service

You may call the API, script against it, and build products on it. You may not:

present our output as something other than what it is, or attribute to us a claim we did not make;
misrepresent the neutrality commitment, or imply a paid or endorsed relationship with us that does not exist;
attempt to obtain data you are not entitled to, interfere with the service, or evade a limit or a refusal;
use the service in a way that breaks the law where you are or where we are.

We may refuse or withdraw service for any of the above.

6. Billing

These are the rules that govern every purchase. They were written before any money moved, so that they could not be written to suit the first dispute.

Seller and payment. The seller is Sparks & Sawdust LLC. Payments are processed by Stripe on a Stripe-hosted Checkout page; we never receive your card number. Charges appear on your card statement as SPARKS AND SAWDUST LLC, because a statement descriptor cannot contain an ampersand. Current plans, prices and availability are published at https://modelspec.dev/pricing. Checkout asks you to accept these terms before you pay.

Paying by x402. You may instead buy a pack with USDC on the Base network under the x402 protocol. Your software signs a transfer authorization for one of the offered amounts, and we pass it to Coinbase's x402 facilitator to verify and settle. The pack's credits are added to the key that made the request only after the transfer has settled on-chain. The receiving address and the amounts are stated in the 402 response. A payment to any other address, or of any other amount, is refused and never settled. An on-chain transfer cannot be reversed by us or by you. By sending an x402 payment you accept these terms.

What you buy. Paid access is metered in credits, one balance per API key. There are two ways to buy them. Packs can be paid for by card through Stripe or by x402, at the same dollar price, with one USDC counted as one US dollar:

Plans — Solo ($29 a month, 2,500 credits), Team ($199 a month, 25,000 credits) and Scale ($799 a month, 150,000 credits). A plan's monthly allowance is set to its full amount on each paid invoice. It is reset, not added to: unused monthly credits do not roll over. Scale may also draw metered overage at $0.006 per credit, up to 150,000 credits in a billing period, once that Price is for sale.
Packs — one-off purchases of 250, 1,300, 2,750 or 6,000 credits, for $5, $25, $50 or $100. Pack credits expire 12 months after purchase.
Metadata reads — a keyed catalog read costs $0.002, one credit per 10 reads, capped at 1,000 reads a key a UTC day.

Customers who already bought a legacy plan or pack keep that price and allowance: Solo at $10 a month for 4,000 credits, Team at $50 a month for 30,000 credits, and packs of 1,250 credits for $5, 7,500 for $25, 20,000 for $50, and 50,000 for $100.

A call draws the monthly allowance first, then pack credits, the ones expiring soonest first. How many credits each kind of successful call draws is published on the pricing page.

Your key. A key bought without an existing one is shown to you once, when you claim it after Checkout. We store only a hash of it and cannot show it to you again. Anyone holding your key can spend its credits, so keep it as you would a password. POST /v1/billing/rotate, called with the key you hold, replaces it; the remaining credits move to the new key and the old one stops working.

When a plan ends. If a plan's payment fails, or the subscription is cancelled or lapses, its monthly allowance goes to zero at once and the key falls back to the free tier. Pack credits are not affected and remain until they expire. A later paid invoice restores the monthly allowance. To cancel a plan, write to [email protected].

6.1 Only a successful result is charged. A charge is incurred when, and only when, the service has delivered a result to you. A request that does not produce a delivered result is not charged, whatever caused it.

6.2 What counts as a delivered result. An HTTP 200 response carrying a non-empty result: a ranking, or a policy-check answer. A ranking that reports ranking_status: "partial" is a delivered result: it means some models lack the evidence to be ordered, which is the answer, honestly labelled, and not a degraded one. A policy-check answer in which some checks are undetermined is a delivered result for the same reason. We would rather tell you what we do not know than charge you for a guess.

6.3 What is never charged. None of the following is a delivered result, and none of them is charged:

a refusal for a malformed or invalid request (HTTP 400, 413);
a request to an endpoint or method that does not exist (HTTP 404, 405);
a well-formed request that no model survives (HTTP 422). You are told which constraint emptied the pool; you are not billed for the finding;
any failure on our side, including an unreachable or unreadable catalogue (HTTP 5xx), a timeout, or a response you never received;
a payment-required response (HTTP 402), or an answer given at the free tier because the key has no credits left;
a rate-limit refusal. Being told to slow down costs nothing (HTTP 429), and being refused for a missing, invalid or revoked credential costs nothing (HTTP 401, 403). A refusal is not a service.

6.4 Settlement before delivery. Credits are paid for in advance. Before an answer is produced, the credits it costs are reserved from your balance; they are drawn when the result is delivered and released untouched when it is not. An unsuccessful call leaves your balance where it was.

6.5 Partial failure. If a charge is taken and no result reaches you, that charge is refunded in full. You do not need to show that the failure was ours. If you were charged and are not sure you were served, tell us and we will look; where the record is ambiguous, it resolves in your favour.

6.6 Refunds. Charges for delivered results are not refundable merely because you disliked the answer — the ranking is the product, and a ranking that only charged when it flattered would not be worth having. We refund: anything charged without a delivered result (§6.5); anything charged in error, including duplicate or mis-metered charges; and unused prepaid balance, on request, minus nothing. Credits bought by x402 are refunded in USDC on Base to the address the payment came from, or to another address you prove you control, less nothing. If we withdraw the service or these terms change to your material detriment, unused balance is refunded.

6.7 Prices. Prices are published at https://modelspec.dev/pricing before they apply. A price change does not apply retroactively to credits you already bought.

6.8 Taxes. Prices are in US dollars. For pack purchases through x402, the published pack price includes any applicable tax. The price shown before you pay is the total amount you pay, including any applicable tax. For purchases through Stripe, any tax charged is shown at Checkout before you pay. You are responsible for taxes on your own side of the transaction.

7. Your data

The privacy statement is at https://modelspec.dev/legal/privacy/ and describes what the service records, including what it keeps about a paid key and a purchase. Two points belong here because they are terms, not just practice:

We do not receive your prompts. A rank request carries a profile — use case, environment, constraints — computed on your side, and a policy-check request carries the policy you want checked. Prompt text is not a field of this API. Widening it toward prompt text would be a breach of this commitment, not a feature release.
We do not proxy your inference tokens, so we do not see, store or meter the content of your model calls. There is nothing for us to hold.

8. Data, licences and what you may do with the output

The catalogue data is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 (LICENSE-DATA). The code, including the ranking method, is licensed MIT (LICENSE). Those licences govern the data and the code; these terms govern the hosted service, and nothing here takes away a right either licence grants you.

The public copy of the data, in the repository, is a delayed image: it is about nine months behind. Current data is available only through the service, by a person on the site or by a machine through the API or the MCP server. We offer no data download. The command-line client, modelspec (Python package modelspec-dev), is a client for the service: it gets answers only from the API, with a key, and stores none of them.

Rankings are computed from that data, so redistributing a substantial part of it carries the CC BY-SA attribution and share-alike conditions with it. Acting on a ranking, quoting one, or building a product whose output is informed by one does not put your product under that licence.

Card data is compiled from third-party sources, each cited with the date it was read. We do not own those sources and grant you no rights in them.

9. Accuracy, and the absence of any warranty

Rankings are computed from published benchmark results and vendor-stated facts, which are incomplete, sometimes wrong, and always out of date by some margin. We publish the floors, the provenance of each row and the date each source was read so you can judge for yourself. A model's position is evidence about evidence. It is not advice, and it is not a promise about how the model will behave for you. A policy-check verdict cites the source it rests on so you can read it yourself; it is not legal advice.

The disclaimer below is the one from the MIT License, which is the licence this project's code already carries (LICENSE), reproduced verbatim rather than rewritten:

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.

There is no uptime commitment and no support commitment. Neither is offered, so neither is promised.

10. Changes, suspension and termination

We may change the service. A change to the ranking method is published in the method itself, which is public. A change to these terms is published here with a new version, and a change that materially reduces what you get takes effect for you only after it is published, never before.

You may stop using the service at any time. We may suspend or end access for a breach of §5. §4 does not expire, is not suspended, and does not change with a new version of these terms.

Version 1.7 (2026-10-13) adds payment by x402 in USDC on Base (§2, §6). No other term changed.

Version 1.6 (2026-10-10) changed §6: new prices for Solo and Team, a Scale plan with metered overage, repriced packs, and priced metadata reads; plans and packs already bought keep the price and allowance they were bought at. No other term changed. Version 1.5 (2026-10-09) adds the copyright paragraph to §12, which points to the copyright and DMCA page; no term changed. Version 1.4 (2026-10-04) records that keys are enforced: a request for an answer without a key is refused, and only a person using the decide page by hand is served without one. No other term changed. Version 1.3 (2026-10-04) described the command-line client, a keyed client for the service; there is still no data download. Version 1.2 (2026-09-30) corrected our legal name to Sparks & Sawdust LLC, the name registered with Rhode Island and the IRS, and corrected the card-statement name in §6 to SPARKS AND SAWDUST LLC, which is what Stripe sends; no term changed. Version 1.1 (2026-09-30) changed §2 and §8: it states that only a person looking things up by hand gets the site free, that machine access is paid and hosted, and that the public copy of the data is a delayed image with no download of current data. Version 1.0 (2026-09-19) was the adoption.

11. What this version does not address

This version states no governing law, venue, limitation of liability, indemnity or dispute-resolution procedure. It says so rather than guessing at them. Where these terms are silent, they add nothing to and take nothing from the law that applies. Adding any of these later is a change under §10.

12. Contact

Sparks & Sawdust LLC. Questions, cancellation and privacy requests: [email protected]. Our postal address is available on request at [email protected].