Terms of service

pokemontcgapi.com is a read-only REST API over a factual database of published Pokémon Trading Card Game cards and sets, together with dated price observations for those cards. You send HTTP requests, you get JSON back. Nothing on our side stores, displays or manages a collection for you.

These terms cover both the API at https://api.pokemontcgapi.com and this website. Using either means you accept them. If you are agreeing on behalf of a company, you are stating that you may bind it.

Unofficial. Not produced, endorsed, supported by or affiliated with Nintendo, Creatures Inc., GAME FREAK inc. or The Pokémon Company International. Pokémon and all related marks are trademarks of their respective owners.

We publish facts about published cards: names, numbers, set membership, release dates, rarities, artist credits, images and observed prices. We do not claim any right in the underlying works, we do not use any third-party logo, wordmark or typeface in our branding, and nothing you receive from this API is a licence to use anybody’s trademarks.

Access is identified by a single X-Api-Key header. A key is issued to you, and requests made with it are attributed to you regardless of who sent them — so treat it as a credential, keep it out of client-side code and public repositories, and tell us at [email protected] if it leaks.

Enforcement is not switched on yet. As of 2026-08-27 the API answers requests that carry no key at all. That is a transitional state of the deployment, not a grant: these terms govern your use of the service however you reach it, and quota enforcement will be turned on without it changing what you are permitted to do.

You may build anything on this API, including a commercial product. You may not:

• redistribute the price observations as a dataset, a feed, a dump or a mirror, or operate a competing price API on top of them — see clause 6, this is the limit we inherit rather than the one we invented;
• circumvent rate limits or quotas, including by rotating keys, distributing one key across unrelated parties, or sharing a key with anyone outside your organisation;
• attempt to obtain data through the API that it does not serve you, or to reach another account;
• use the service to build or train a product whose purpose is to reproduce the catalogue as a substitute for it;
• misrepresent the data as official, as endorsed by a rights holder, or as ours when it is not.

Automated use is expected. Crawling is fine within your plan limits; the limits are the mechanism, and we do not add unwritten rules on top of them.

The catalogue is a collection of facts about published cards. Facts are not owned by us, and we do not claim they are. What we do claim is the particular selection, normalisation and arrangement of that catalogue, and the software that serves it.

Names, artwork, set names and game text remain the property of their respective rights holders. Card images are served for identification. If you hold rights in material we carry and want it removed, write to [email protected] — we act on takedown requests within one business day and note the change, dated, on the changelog.

Every price row we serve states its own source and provenance, and each source carries its own redistribution position. Some of what we carry is ours; most of it is not. That is the single most important asymmetry in this document, and it is documented in full on the price methodology page and the attribution page, both of which form part of these terms.

In practice: you may use price observations inside your own product, including commercially, under your plan. You may not resell them as data. A source can be switched off at any time if its rights holder asks us to, and when that happens the rows stop being served to everyone, on every plan, without notice and without it being a breach of these terms by us.

Plans, quotas, rate limits and prices are described on the pricing page, which is the operative description — these terms do not restate the numbers, so that the two cannot disagree. Paid plans are billed in advance through a payment processor; we never see your card details.

A free plan may be rate limited, changed, or withdrawn. Paid plans continue to the end of the period you paid for. [OWNER: refund policy — pro-rata on cancellation, or no refunds after the period starts] [OWNER: notice period for a price change on an existing paid plan, e.g. 30 days by email]

Within a version prefix, a field that exists will not be removed, renamed or change type, and an error code will not change meaning. New fields may appear at any time, so parse permissively. Anything we withdraw is announced, dated, on the changelog, and the feed at /changelog.xml exists so you do not have to notice by revisiting a page.

[OWNER: notice period for a breaking change or an endpoint withdrawal on a paid plan]

The service is provided as is. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, that any particular endpoint will exist tomorrow, or that a price observation is accurate, current or fit for a valuation. Prices are observations reported by third parties, delayed and aggregated; they are not appraisals and they are not investment advice.

Catalogue completeness varies by field. What a card object actually contains is documented in the API reference, and a field being present in the schema is not a promise that it is populated for every card.

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental or consequential loss, for lost profits, or for any decision you took on the basis of a number this API returned. Our total liability for any claim arising out of the service is capped at [OWNER: liability cap — proposed: the fees you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or EUR 100 if you are on the free plan]

Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including for fraud or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.

We may suspend a key that is breaching clause 4, that is degrading the service for others, or that a rights holder has credibly complained about. Where we can, we mail you first. Where we cannot, we mail you immediately afterwards and tell you what we saw.

You may stop using the service at any time; that is the whole cancellation procedure.

These terms are governed by [OWNER: governing law — jurisdiction to be chosen] and disputes go to the courts of [OWNER: forum — court and city]. The contracting entity, its registered address and its company or VAT number are [OWNER: legal entity name, registered address, company/VAT number]

Everything reaches a person at [email protected] — rights complaints, billing, security reports and questions about a clause on this page. There is no ticket form and no queue to escalate through.

How we handle the data a request leaves behind is a separate document: the privacy notice.