Terms of Service

Compair AI Limited. 9 September 2026.

1. Who we are

COMPAIR AI LIMITED, registered in England and Wales, company number 16732731, registered office Apartment 205, 2 Wollstonecraft Street, London N1C 4BT. “You” means the organisation holding the licence: a licence goes to an organisation, not to a person. Email support@compairai.com about an account or a charge, sales@compairai.com about an invoice, privacy@compairai.com about data protection and security@compairai.com about a vulnerability.

2. What you are buying

Compair lets you read and compare spending data that English councils published themselves. We standardise it, match it, benchmark it and present it: that work is what you are buying, not the data, which is free from the councils.

There is no export of council data: no download, no spreadsheet, no report file. The product draws its charts in your browser, so the figures behind a page, supplier names included, arrive there to be drawn, and a right click copies a single value. There is no way to take the whole thing away.

3. The licences

A council licence covers one named council and opens every report, and only that council may buy one. A market licence covers all publishing councils across fewer reports. A free account opens part of two report pages. Signed out, nothing opens. The reference pages “How the numbers work” and “Data quality” are open to everyone who signs in, and section 7 makes them part of this agreement.

What your licence opens is decided on our servers, so no request from a browser can widen it. We may change, add or withdraw reports, but will not materially reduce what your licence opens during a paid period without telling your billing owner.

4. Who gets access

Anyone who signs in with an email address at your domain joins your organisation and inherits your licence. There is no invitation step and no approval step. You are responsible for who holds an address at your domain: to take access away, remove the address. There is no seat limit and no price per person.

Everyone in your organisation can see the name, email address and last sign-in date of everyone else in it. If that matters to you, read that sentence twice.

5. Buying, price and billing

Each organisation has one billing owner, by default whoever bought it. Only the billing owner, or us, can open the billing portal, change the card, read the invoices or cancel.

Prices are not in this document. They are shown in the product and read live from Stripe, so what is on screen is what is charged. Prices exclude VAT, added where it applies. A price change takes effect at your next renewal.

Buy by card through Stripe’s checkout, or ask sales@compairai.com for an invoice. We never see, handle or store a card number. Access starts when the payment reaches us, and your own purchase order terms do not apply.

6. Renewal, cancellation and refunds

A monthly licence runs for a month, an annual one for twelve, and both renew until cancelled. Your billing owner cancels in the Stripe portal, and cancelling takes effect at the end of the period you have paid for, not immediately.

Refunds. If you ask within 14 days of your first payment for a licence, and nobody at your organisation has signed in since that payment was taken, we refund it in full. That applies to a first payment, monthly or annual, not a renewal. After that, cancelling runs the licence to the end of the period you have paid for and no money comes back. We use signing in as the test because it is the use we record.

A refund does not cancel your subscription or end your access. Cancelling is a separate act.

If a payment fails, your access continues while Stripe retries the card and ends when it stops. When a licence ends, your account drops to the free level and nothing is deleted.

7. What the numbers are, and what they are not

This section matters more than any other.

The data is councils' own. We add no spending figure of our own, and we do not correct the figures a council published. We add population and deprivation figures from the Office for National Statistics, company data from Companies House, and nothing from a data broker.

1. It is not a budget, an outturn or a complete account. Published spend leaves out payroll, grant income and internal recharges and nets credit notes, so a line can be negative. Councils publish only payments over £500, some over £250.
2. Missing is not zero. A council that published nothing is absent from every figure. We never infer, guess or fill a blank.
3. A benchmark gap is not a saving. It is the size of a difference, before anyone has asked whether it is justified.
4. A comparison is not a judgement. Below the median is not efficient: a council spending less than its group may be under-serving. A matched group controls for size, need and responsibilities, never for policy choice.

We standardise and present the published data with reasonable care and skill, but we do not warrant the accuracy or completeness of what councils published. Do not treat anything in the product as a finding, a saving or an audit conclusion: it is a prompt to look further, and the decision is yours.

Some of what councils published names individuals. Our notice to them is the data transparency statement, whose first screen is how a name is taken out. A name we remove stays removed, so a figure may change between quarters.

8. What you may and may not do

You may use what you read inside your organisation, and quote a figure or reproduce a chart in something you publish, if you credit Compair and the council publication and carry the relevant limitation from section 7.

You must not extract, scrape or copy data by automated means; take the data out in bulk; redistribute, republish or resell what you read; work around the licence enforcement or the reading limits; share sign-in credentials outside your organisation; or use the product to build or train a competing one.

We limit how much can be read. Reading is metered by council in a rolling window, and the contract register is served a page at a time. The limits are set well above ordinary use: every report for one council and one financial year is about a quarter of an hour’s allowance, so a council licence reading its own council will not meet them in a normal working session. Those limits raise the cost of a sweep. They are not the boundary of what you agreed to: the rules above are.

9. Confidentiality

Each of us will keep the other’s confidential information confidential and use it only for this agreement, for three years after it ends.

10. Everything else

What is ours. We own the platform and everything we make of the data. Your licence is non-exclusive, non-transferable and lasts as long as your subscription.

Personal data. What we hold about people who use the product is in our privacy notice. For council spending data we are a controller in our own right, not a processor for any council.

Availability. We provide the service on a reasonable endeavours basis. We commit to no uptime percentage, offer no service level agreement, hold no security certification and have commissioned no penetration test. If you need any of those, say so before you buy. The product is hosted in Microsoft Azure UK South; your sign-in identity and payment data sit outside the United Kingdom.

Suspension. We may suspend or end your access if payment has failed and Stripe has stopped retrying, if you materially breach section 8 and do not put it right within 14 days of us asking, if you are not the council your council licence names, or if the law requires it. We may withdraw the service on 90 days' notice, refunding the unused part of anything paid in advance.

Liability. Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything that cannot lawfully be limited. Beyond that, neither of us is liable for loss of profit, revenue, business or contracts, for loss of anticipated savings, for loss of goodwill or data, or for any indirect loss, and each party’s total liability is limited to what you have paid us in the 12 months before the event. We are not liable for what a council published, for a decision you take on something you saw in Compair, or for a failure outside our control. You are not a consumer under this agreement.

Changes. We may change these terms. If a change is material and bad for you we will email your billing owner 30 days beforehand: carrying on after that is acceptance, and if you do not accept it you may cancel then, for a refund of the unused part of the period.

The rest. These terms, your order, the privacy notice and the data transparency statement are the whole agreement. We may transfer it to a buyer of our business. If a clause cannot be enforced, the rest stands. Sections 7 to 10 survive termination. It is governed by the law of England and Wales, whose courts have exclusive jurisdiction.