Three ways to use Fonteum

The full 12-dimension procurement brief — with the downloadable PDF and JSON twin — lives at /compare.

What's the demo key for?

pk_dx_sample is a shared, read-only key you can use without signing up. It is rate-limited to 100 requests an hour across all callers, so it is built for evaluation and quickstarts — not production traffic. Every response carries the same provenance contract you get on a paid tier, so you can judge the data quality before you commit.

Can I self-host?

The federal source data is public domain (US Government Works), and our ingestion methodology is documented on the methodology pages, so you are free to rebuild the pipeline yourself. What you pay Fonteum for is the maintained snapshots, the per-field provenance graph, the FHIR + MCP surfaces, and the refresh SLA. Pilot customers can arrange a private mirror under signed enterprise terms.

What's your refund policy?

Monthly plans can be cancelled at any time and stop renewing at the end of the current billing period; we do not pro-rate partial months. If a billing error is ours, we correct it in full. Annual and pilot agreements follow the terms in the signed contract.

Do you offer educational or research discounts?

Yes. Access is free for accredited universities and for investigative-journalism use, in both cases with attribution. Researchers can request a key through the researcher signup flow; newsroom and academic teams can email us and we will set you up under the free research tier.

How is rate-limiting handled?

Limits are enforced per key on a rolling window — per-hour on the demo key, per-month on Developer and Team. Every response returns the remaining quota in its headers so your client can back off cleanly, and a 429 includes a retry-after hint. Bursting above your tier returns 429 rather than silently dropping requests.

What's included in a pilot?

A pilot is a scoped engagement for enterprise and procurement teams: an isolated instance (your query traffic runs in a dedicated environment with non-logged lookups — your usage pattern stays private), dedicated throughput with a signed SLA, procurement-ready attestations (Ed25519-chained snapshot digests and signed audit-trail exports for vendor-review workflows), volume pricing, custom dataset onboarding (including HRSA, BLS, and BEA enrichment), signed enterprise terms with a DPA and a BAA on request, a dedicated Slack channel, and quarterly methodology reviews. Fonteum's data is entirely public federal data — no PHI involved on the data side. Pilots start with a short intake call to scope datasets and delivery.

Does Fonteum log what I look up?

On the public tiers (Demo, Developer, Team), query traffic passes through shared infrastructure and standard request logs apply. On the Pilot tier, your queries run in an isolated instance: lookups against public federal data are not retained in shared access logs, so your team's usage pattern — which providers you query, how often, in what sequence — is private to your instance. This protects your firm's research footprint. Fonteum's underlying data is entirely public federal data; no PHI is involved, so this is not a health-data protection — it's a business-intelligence privacy posture for your team.