People connecting aVenture to their own products keep asking the same question: what am I allowed to build with this? Version 1.1 of the Terms of Service, effective October 4, 2026 (November 3, 2026 for accounts created before then), answers it directly. This post walks through the parts that matter to builders. It is a plain-English guide, not a substitute for the Terms; where the two differ, the Terms control.
Three ways to use the data
The first two work on every plan, including the free Essential plan; bulk lookup jobs need AI Plus or AI Pro. All three reach the same company and people data:
- In your website, app, or deployed assistant. Your server looks up a company and shows its name, logo, links, tags, and profile to your own users, or answers them through an AI assistant you run.
- In your AI and coding agents. You connect the MCP server or CLI and research from the chat or terminal you already use.
- In your pipeline. Your code resolves batches of names or websites to records in a background job, subscribes to news-alert webhooks, and deduplicates rows. See bulk lookup jobs, news alerts, and company lookup.
All three draw on the same plan allowances. Plans explained lists them.
Live Display: show results to your users
The Terms call the first pattern Live Display. Section 5 says:
"On any plan, you may show results from the aVenture API, CLI, or MCP server in a website, app, or AI assistant you operate, including one that others use (“Live Display”). Live Display passes results through; it does not copy them."
Live Display comes with four conditions. Each result must be:
- Fresh: "requested from aVenture when it is shown, or held in a cache only to show it again, for no longer than 24 hours."
- Credited: each result "credits aVenture as its source and links to its aVenture page when the result includes one."
- Not accumulated: you "do not store, export, or accumulate results beyond that cache, or combine them into your own database, list, index, or dataset."
- Not redistributed: you "do not sell, license, or redistribute the results themselves, or let others download, search, or query them in bulk or through your own API or feed."
Requests made for Live Display count toward your plan's allowances like any other request.
In practice, Live Display covers things like these:
- Showing a customer's logo and name from company brand lookup next to their account in your dashboard.
- Enriching a sign-up form with the company behind a work email, cached for a day.
- A support or sales assistant that looks up a company through the MCP server while answering a user, and credits aVenture in its answer.
Your own research is yours to use
Using aVenture for your own decisions is the core license. Section 5 grants a license "for your own internal research and business purposes." You can also quote it in your own work: Section 5 says that "brief, attributed excerpts in your own memos, reports, presentations, articles, or client deliverables" are not competitive use, "as long as they do not make Public Research Data available in bulk or in a form others can search or query."
What needs an Enterprise agreement
Some uses go beyond showing results. The Terms call these Competitive Use:
"using Public Research Data, or output, exports, or API, CLI, or MCP results that contain or are derived from it, to build, supply, enrich, or improve, or to decide the coverage of, a database, dataset, feed, directory, research or data service, software product, or AI model that others can access and that provides information about companies, investors, funds, people, products, markets, or news."
That includes "repackaging, reformatting, summarizing, combining with other data, or redistributing," whether it is sold or free. No plan on the pricing page includes Competitive Use, including custom-priced ones. It needs a signed Enterprise Agreement that expressly grants it, states its price, and defines its scope. If you are building a data product on top of aVenture, contact us and we will talk about one.
A few more rules worth knowing
- No model training for others. You may not "use Public Research Data to train, fine-tune, or evaluate a machine-learning model offered to others."
- Keep the credit. You may not "remove or obscure aVenture marks, watermarks, attributions, or source links."
- Use the API, not a scraper. Bulk access goes through the documented API, CLI, or MCP server within your plan's limits, not by scraping the website.
- Keep keys secret. "API keys are credentials: keep them secret, do not embed them in public code, and do not share them."
- Not a consumer report. aVenture data may not be used for credit, insurance, employment, or housing eligibility decisions.
Where to start
The API quickstart and the brand lookup guide cover the Live Display pattern, and Use Cases and Examples has recipes for each common job. Read Section 5 of the Terms before you ship.