Terms of service

What HailCatch is, and what it is not

HailCatch is a find-the-work tool, not claims documentation. Radar hail sizes are calibrated estimates, not measurements; ground reports are third-party observations we pass through. Nothing here is meteorologist-certified, court-ready or insurance-grade, and it must not be presented as any of those.

It matters enough to spell out, because the two numbers on this site look alike and are not:

• A radar footprint is an inference. It comes from NOAA’s MESH product, which was deliberately designed to over-forecast — about three quarters of hail actually observed falls below the raw radar estimate. We never show you that raw number. What we show is a calibrated estimate with a confidence band, and where our model has too few paired ground observations to speak for a size, it says so instead of guessing.
• A ground report is somebody’s observation. It comes from the NOAA Storm Prediction Center, filed by a spotter, a law-enforcement officer or a member of the public. We pass it through and label it as measured. We did not witness it and we have not verified it.

Use it to decide where to drive. Do not use it as evidence of what fell on a particular roof or a particular vehicle, in an insurance claim, in a dispute, or in court. If you need that, you need a meteorologist’s certified report, which this is not and does not replace.

No warranty, in the ordinary sense of the words

The service is provided as it is. We work hard on the numbers and we publish how they are derived, but we do not warrant that a footprint, a size, a vehicle count or a place name is correct, complete or current, and weather data feeds go down. Decisions about where to send a crew, what to spend and what to promise a customer are yours.

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for lost profits, wasted journeys, lost business or other indirect losses arising from using the service.

Accounts and organisations

• You sign in with a link sent to your email address. Keep access to that mailbox — anyone who can read it can sign in as you.
• An organisation is the wall around your data. Its owner decides who joins it, and everything inside it is invisible to every other operator. That is enforced by the database, not by this application.
• An alert rule can only ever page the person who created it. An owner cannot enrol their crew, by construction rather than by policy.
• You are responsible for what the people you add to your organisation do with it.

Fair use

Do not:

• scrape or bulk-download the data behind the site, or resell it as a data feed;
• present our estimates as certified, court-ready or insurance-grade, or imply that NOAA, the National Weather Service or any government agency endorses this product — they do not;
• try to reach another operator’s rows, or test the walls between organisations on live data. If you think you have found a way through, tell us instead;
• use the service to break the law or somebody else’s rights.

The data underneath, and what you owe it

Hail, radar and forecast data comes from NOAA — MRMS, the Storm Prediction Center and the National Weather Service — and is in the public domain. Demographics and boundaries come from the U.S. Census Bureau. Business and logistics data comes from OpenStreetMap and is licensed under the Open Database License; city data comes from GeoNames under CC BY 4.0.

If you republish anything derived from those last two, their attribution requirements travel with it and become yours to meet. We carry them on every surface here; a screenshot pasted into a proposal carries them too.

Paid plans

The storms feed is free. Where a plan is required, payment is handled by Stripe — card details never reach our servers — and a subscription can be cancelled from the billing portal at any time, taking effect at the end of the period already paid for. Prices and what each plan includes are shown at the point of purchase, and are the version that binds.

Ending it

You can stop using HailCatch whenever you like, and ask us to delete your account and everything attached to it. We may suspend an account that is breaking the fair-use terms above, and we will say why.

Changes to these terms

When this page changes, the date at the top changes with it. A change that materially affects a paying customer will be sent to them before it takes effect.

Still to be settled

These belong in a complete set of terms and are not decided yet. They are printed rather than quietly omitted, because a document that silently leaves out its own governing law is making a promise it has not kept — and a made-up jurisdiction would be far worse than an admitted gap.

• The legal entity behind HailCatch. Not yet named here. It will be stated before any paid account opens.
• Governing law and venue. Not yet chosen. We will not invent a jurisdiction to fill the gap.

Getting in touch

Write to support@hailcatch.com.