Terms of service

Last updated: 2026-08-23.

What this is

Research Desk ("we", "us") searches the public web for a question you ask, reads the pages it finds, and returns a written brief whose claims carry references to those pages. You ("you", "the customer") pay per brief at the rates published on our pricing page. We are an independent Ounie product.

Billing

There is no subscription for this product. Briefs are billed in Ounie credits (1 credit = 1¢) from your shared Ounie wallet, priced by depth. The price is reserved when you submit and settled only when the brief is delivered. A failed, timed-out or aborted brief refunds the reservation automatically and in full — and so does a brief in which nothing could be traced to a source, which we mark thin rather than deliver. Reading, exporting and polling a brief you already paid for never bill. Credits are purchased and managed on ounie.com; your existing briefs remain accessible regardless of your credit balance. Keyless x402 calls are paid per call in USDC and are final once settled on chain, which is why a search runs before settlement and a question with no sources is refused free of charge.

Accuracy and how you may rely on this

A brief reports what its sources say. Claims that cannot be traced to a page we actually fetched are removed rather than repaired, and the counts of what was removed are returned with the brief. That is a guarantee about attribution, not about truth: a well-cited claim can still rest on a source that is wrong, out of date or biased. Briefs are provided as-is and are not legal, financial, medical or professional advice. Check the sources before you act on a brief, and before you publish anything derived from one.

Acceptable use

You will not use the service to build a dataset for resale, to evade a publisher's access controls, or to research a person for harassment or surveillance. You will not attempt to discover endpoints we haven't documented, bypass rate limits, or resell raw access to the service. Domain filters are a research convenience, not a licence: content fetched from a publisher remains theirs, and quoting it beyond fair use is your responsibility.

Your content

As between you and us, you own the questions you ask and the briefs you receive, and you may use them commercially. We claim no rights over either and do not use them to train models. Source text quoted inside a brief belongs to its publisher and is included for attribution.

Availability

We depend on upstream search and language-model providers. When one is unavailable, briefs are refused with a 503 and nothing is charged. We do not promise a service level and may change or discontinue features; published prices apply to briefs you run before a change.

Liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, our total liability for any claim relating to the service is limited to the credits you spent on the briefs the claim concerns. We are not liable for indirect or consequential losses, including decisions taken on the basis of a brief.

Contact

/contact · routed to ounie@ounie.com