Fair use and attribution
These servers proxy public United States government APIs within the rate limits each source sets. Three rules follow from that, and all three are enforced in code rather than promised in prose.
Caching and licenses
Whether a response may be cached is a property of the source, not a policy applied to everything at once. Where terms permit caching, the gateway serves from cache and your call does not reach the agency. Where they do not, the request passes through live and nothing is retained.
The consequence worth knowing: an identical call made twice may cost one upstream request or two, depending on the source. It costs the same against your quota either way, which is the number you are buying.
Attribution
Attribution notices travel with the data. They are part of the response rather than something you are trusted to add later, so a downstream reader sees where a figure came from without the integration having to remember to say so.
Two things this service is not, and the distinction matters when you publish:
- Not an official government source. Every source proxies a public API. HARBOR Port is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting for any agency, and it must not be presented as one.
- Not a substitute for the record. Where a figure decides something that matters, cite the agency. This gateway makes public data reachable from an agent; it does not make it authoritative.
Limits and abuse
Quotas are per account, upstream ceilings are respected rather than resold, and abusive traffic is throttled. Two behaviours get an account throttled rather than merely refused:
- Traffic shaped to work around a per-minute ceiling rather than to stay under it, such as spreading load across many keys on one account.
- Reselling raw access to the gateway itself, as opposed to using it to answer questions. The plans price inquiry, not bulk transport.
The licensing terms of each source govern what you may do with its data, and they are enforced at the gateway before data leaves it. If a use case is unclear, ask before building on it: get in touch and we will tell you which source terms apply rather than leaving you to guess.
See also Terms and Privacy, which cover the account relationship rather than the data itself.