These terms are the agreement between you and Groundwork for using the website, the site reports and AI tools, accounts, teams and plans. Please read them; the sections on renewal, the figures and our liability matter most. Last updated September 28, 2026.
This agreement
These terms are an agreement between you and Groundwork, a trade name of Groundworks LLC (“Groundwork”, “we”, “us”). They cover the website, the site reports, the AI tools, accounts, teams and plans, and the contact form. The Privacy policy, which explains how we handle personal information, forms part of them.
By using Groundwork, making an account or buying a plan, you accept these terms. If you use Groundwork for a company or other organization, you accept them on its behalf and confirm you’re authorized to; “you” then means the organization as well as you.
Groundwork is for businesses and professionals, and for people 18 or older. If we build something for you, a separate written agreement covers that work; where it and these terms disagree, that agreement wins.
Your account
An account is an email address. You sign in with a password you choose, or with Google or Microsoft. A code we email to the address confirms a new account, and lets you choose a new password if you forget yours. Anyone who knows your password, can sign in to that Google or Microsoft account, or can read that inbox could get into your account, so keep them secure, and tell us straight away if you think someone else has signed in as you.
An account’s address has to be real and yours: a code we email to it, or signing in with Google or Microsoft, confirms it before the account can be used. Each inbox has one account, so we read an address with a “+” tag added (and, at Gmail, with dots added) as the same address.
An account is for one person. Use an address you control, and don’t share the account or sign in for someone else.
You’re responsible for what’s done with your account.
You can change the email address your account uses from your account page. We confirm the new address with a code sent to it, and tell the old one. You can also delete your account there; an owner whose plan is set to renew cancels it first. Changing your password or email, or deleting the account, asks for your password again if you signed in more than a few minutes before.
If we’ve given you a password login, it’s personal to you too. The first time you use it, it becomes your account’s password, which you can then change. Its unlimited use is ours to give and we may switch it off at any time; it isn’t a plan and carries no allowance to refund.
Free actions and the trial
Anyone can search and see the report blurred. A new account comes with one free trial of 10 actions to use within 3 days, with no card needed. It starts with the account’s first action.
The trial is once per person. Please don’t use extra email addresses, scripts or other workarounds to get more trials or free actions than you were given. We may change the trial, or stop offering it, at any time.
Plans, renewal and payment
The plans, what each includes and their prices are on the pricing page. Plans are billed monthly or yearly, in advance at the start of each billing period, in U.S. dollars. Prices don’t include taxes; where tax applies, it’s added to the charge, and you’re responsible for it.
Your plan renews automatically. At the end of each billing period it renews for another period of the same length, a month or a year, and we charge the payment method on file the plan’s price at that time, until you cancel. You can cancel at any time before a renewal; see Cancelling and refunds.
Changes to prices, plans and usage
We reserve the right to change our prices, plans and usage terms at any time, for any reason. That includes what each plan costs and includes, how many actions each account gets, what counts as an action, how many accounts a team can have, the extra action packs and their prices, the free actions and the trial, and the limits on how quickly and how much Groundwork can be used. We may also add, change or stop offering any plan.
A change applies to new plans and purchases as soon as it’s on the pricing page. For a plan you’ve already paid for, it applies from your next renewal. If it raises your plan’s price or reduces what the plan includes, we’ll email the team’s owner at least 30 days before that renewal, and you can cancel before then to avoid it. The rate and daily limits described under Actions and fair use can change at any time.
Changing plan
You can move to another plan, switch between monthly and yearly, or change your team’s number of accounts, from your account page. The account page says what a change costs before you confirm it.
A change takes effect at once and starts a new billing period that day, at the new plan’s full price. What’s left of your current period comes off that price as a credit: the unused share of what you paid for it, measured by the time left in the period or by your team’s actions left for it, whichever is less. If the credit is more than the new price, the rest comes off your next payments. The account page shows the price, the credit and what’s due before you confirm.
A discount code applies to the plan you bought with it, for as long as the code says. Changing plan ends it: the new plan starts at its regular price, and the credit counts what you actually paid, not the discount.
A plan can’t have fewer accounts than there are people on the team.
Every plan is priced by the account. What each account costs depends on how many the team has, as the pricing page shows, so adding or removing accounts can change the price of all of them. A team can have up to 500 accounts; for more than that, talk to us.
Extra actions
On Enterprise, the team’s owner can buy extra actions in packs, as a one-time payment, at the prices on the pricing page and the account page. They don’t renew.
They belong to the team. Anyone on it uses them once their own actions for the month have run out, the ones that expire soonest first.
They expire 12 months after you buy them, and any left then are gone. They only work while the team has a plan running: if the plan ends and is renewed before they expire, they work again.
They aren’t refunded, except as described under Cancelling and refunds.
Paying
Payments are handled by Stripe; your card details go to Stripe directly and never reach our servers. You authorize us, through Stripe, to charge your payment method for your plan, its renewals and any changes you make. Please keep it up to date; you can change it from your account page.
If a payment fails, Stripe tries again over the following days and the plan keeps working meanwhile. If the payment still can’t be collected, the plan ends.
A promotion code applies as described when it’s offered. It has no cash value, and we may end an offer at any time, though not for a period already paid for with it.
Invoices and receipts are on the billing page, under Settings on your account page (“Card and invoices”). If you think we’ve charged you wrongly, tell us within 60 days, and please talk to us before disputing a charge with your bank.
Cancelling and refunds
Cancelling. The team’s owner can cancel at any time, online, from the account page: under Settings, choose Cancel plan and confirm. You can also write to us and we’ll cancel it for you. Until the period ends, Keep my plan undoes it.
When it takes effect. Cancelling stops the next renewal. The plan keeps working to the end of the billing period you’ve paid for, and nothing more is charged.
Refunds. Payments aren’t refunded, including for the unused part of a billing period, except where the law requires a refund, where we charged you by mistake, or where we end your plan without cause (see Suspending and ending access), when we refund the unused part, and any extra actions not yet used.
After a plan ends. Everyone on the team goes back to a free account. Accounts, their history and the team stay as they were, so renewing picks up where you left off.
Actions and fair use
An action is anything that runs a paid service for you: searching a site (an address, a ZIP code or a point on the map), or one AI request. An AI request that runs reports on sites counts one more action for each site. Every search counts, a site searched before included; changing an open report’s distances or business type, or reloading it doesn’t. Your account page lists every action.
Each account on a plan has its plan’s actions each month: 1,000 on Starter, 1,500 on Growth, 3,000 on Enterprise. They refill every month from the start of the billing period, on yearly plans too, and unused actions don’t carry over. Each person on a team has their own; they aren’t pooled. When an account has used its month’s actions, searches show blurred and AI requests are refused until they refill.
The allowances are for the person using the account, doing their own work, in an ordinary browser. To keep Groundwork working for everyone, it limits how quickly requests can be made, and some features, such as the AI tools, can pause for the rest of the day if the site as a whole reaches a daily limit with one of its providers. We may change these limits at any time, without notice.
Teams
A plan belongs to a team. Whoever buys it is the team’s owner: they’re responsible for the plan and its payments, and for the people they add, and they accept these terms for the team.
The owner adds people by email, up to the plan’s number of accounts, and can take them off at any time. Please add only people who have agreed to join and expect an email from us.
Each person on a team signs in with their own email address and accepts these terms when they do. Someone taken off a team goes back to a free account.
A person can be on one team at a time. Anyone other than the owner can leave a team from their account page; the owner ends it by cancelling the plan.
An owner’s account can’t be deleted while its plan is running.
What the figures can and can’t tell you
Most figures come from public U.S. government survey, tax, employment and business data. Survey figures are estimates from a sample, carry margins of error (largest for small areas), and describe a five-year period that ended before they were published, not the area as it is today.
Trade areas are built from census block groups, each counted wholly in or out by where its population center falls. Spending figures are modeled estimates of what residents spend, not sales, and leave out visitors and workers.
Competitor locations come from map listings, which can miss, misfile or double-count businesses. Tax-return, lending, permit and business counts are published by ZIP code, county or state, not by trade area, and run one to three years behind.
Traffic counts are as each state reports them and cover main roads only.
Addresses, place names, maps and Street View imagery come from Google and can be wrong or out of date.
Groundwork is a research aid. It isn’t investment, real estate, lending, appraisal, financial, legal or tax advice, and it can’t tell you whether a location or a business will succeed. Check anything that matters against other sources before you rely on it. The decisions you make with it are your own.
Groundwork describes places, not people. It isn’t a consumer report, and mustn’t be used to decide anything about a particular person’s eligibility for credit, insurance, housing or employment.
The AI tools
The AI tools (the memo, questions, business matching, scoring criteria and document checks) use OpenAI’s models to draft text from the reports’ figures. Groundwork checks the figures an answer quotes against the reports, but what the AI writes can still be wrong, incomplete or misleading, and it can misread a document. Treat it as a first draft.
AI output isn’t advice, and shouldn’t be presented as anyone’s professional opinion.
What you give the AI tools is sent to OpenAI to be answered, as the Privacy policy describes.
Your content
Your content is what you give Groundwork: your searches, questions, descriptions, documents and messages. It stays yours. You give us permission to use it only to provide Groundwork to you (to run the reports and AI requests you ask for, and count the actions) and as the Privacy policy describes.
You’re responsible for having the right to give us your content, including any personal information about other people in a document you upload, and for it not being unlawful. We may use information about how Groundwork is used, such as which kinds of places are searched, combined so that it doesn’t identify anyone, to run and improve it.
Using Groundwork fairly
When you use Groundwork, please don’t:
scrape, crawl or bulk-download it, or reach it by any automated means other than an ordinary browser;
share an account, or resell access to Groundwork or offer what it produces as a data feed or a competing service;
get around the free actions, the trial, the allowances, the rate limits or any security measure;
probe, scan or load-test the site, or interfere with anyone else’s use of it;
copy, reverse engineer or rebuild the site, its design or its scoring;
use it to break the law, including using demographic data to discriminate in housing, lending, employment or insurance;
upload anything harmful (such as malware) or anything you don’t have the right to share;
send anything unlawful, abusive or misleading through the site or the contact form.
What’s ours, and what you can do with reports
The site, its code, design, text and scoring method belong to Groundwork and its licensors. While your account is in good standing, we give you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use Groundwork for your own business. The underlying public figures belong to no one.
You may use the reports, memos and exports you produce in your own work, including sharing them with your clients, lenders, investors and colleagues as part of that work. You may not sell them as a data product, publish them in bulk, or use them to build a competing service or database.
Maps, imagery and place names from Google remain under Google’s terms, and competitor listings under the licenses on the data credits page. If you send us ideas or feedback, we may use them without owing you anything for them.
Many figures come from public data services, which haven’t endorsed or certified Groundwork. We don’t control these services, aren’t responsible for them, and they can change or stop without warning.
Changes to Groundwork
We’re always working on Groundwork, and may add, change or remove features, data and providers. We aim to keep it available, but it can be down for maintenance or because a provider is. If we remove something central to a plan you’ve paid for, you can cancel and we’ll refund the unused part of the period.
No promises
Groundwork is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the fullest extent the law allows, we make no warranties of any kind, express or implied, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. We don’t promise that Groundwork will be available, error-free or secure, or that its figures or AI output are correct or current.
Limits on our liability
To the fullest extent the law allows, we aren’t liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for lost profits, revenue, data or business opportunities, arising from Groundwork or from any decision made using it, even if we were told such losses were possible. Our total liability for all claims relating to Groundwork is limited to the greater of what you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose and one hundred U.S. dollars ($100).
Some places don’t allow some of these limits, for example for losses caused by gross negligence or fraud. Where that’s the case, they apply only as far as the law there permits.
If your use leads to a claim
If someone brings a claim against us because of how you used Groundwork, your content, or your breaking these terms, you agree to cover the reasonable costs of dealing with it, including legal fees. We’ll tell you about the claim promptly and let you take part in handling it.
Suspending and ending access
You can stop using Groundwork at any time, cancel a plan as described above, and delete your account from your account page, or ask us to.
We may suspend or end your access if you break these terms, if a payment can’t be collected, if the law requires it, or to protect Groundwork or other people. We’ll tell you why where we can.
If we end a paid plan for any other reason, we’ll refund the unused part of the period.
The sections on the figures, your content, what’s ours, warranties, liability, claims, disputes and the fine print keep applying after access ends.
Disputes
If something goes wrong, write to us first: most things can be settled by email. Please give us 30 days to try to put it right before starting any formal claim. These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Connecticut, and any dispute about them will be heard in the state or federal courts located there, though either of us may bring a claim in small claims court where it qualifies.
Changes to these terms
We may update these terms. When we do, we’ll change the date at the top, and for a change that affects you, we’ll email account holders at least 30 days before it takes effect. If you don’t agree to a change, you can stop using Groundwork and cancel your plan before it takes effect; using Groundwork after that means you accept it. Changes don’t reach back to anything that happened before them.
The fine print
These terms, with the Privacy policy, are the whole agreement between us about Groundwork.
If any part of them can’t be enforced, the rest still applies.
Not enforcing a term straight away doesn’t mean we’ve given it up.
You can’t transfer these terms or your account to anyone else without our agreement. We may transfer them if Groundwork is merged, acquired or sold.
Neither of us is responsible for failing to do something because of events beyond our reasonable control, such as an outage at a provider, a natural disaster or a change in the law.
We’ll send notices to the email address on your account, and you can send them to us at the address below. You agree to receive notices, receipts and these terms electronically.
These terms don’t give rights to anyone other than you and us. Nothing in them makes us partners or agents of each other.
“Including” means “including without limitation”. Headings and the short version are for convenience only.
How to reach us
For anything about these terms, your account or your plan: