Terms of service

Last updated 19 October 2026.

These terms apply when you use RuralCheck. Please read them before you create an account.

Who you are dealing with

RuralCheck is operated by Clemens Mosig, c/o Block Services, Stuttgarter Str. 106, 70736 Fellbach, Germany. Contact: hello@ruralcheck.eu. The full details are on the imprint.

What RuralCheck does

RuralCheck produces a report about a point or a plot you select on a map. The report is calculated automatically from public data. What each check covers, how it is worked out and what it does not include is on the about page and in each check's own note.

A report is for information only. It is not a land survey, a valuation or legal advice, and it does not replace a site visit or a professional survey. It says nothing about planning permission or building rights. For those, contact the local planning authority.

Reports are produced only for locations where the ground has been measured. You can see which areas those are on the map before you buy anything.

Your account

You need an account to run a report. Keep your password to yourself and tell us if you think someone else has it. One account is for one person. You can delete your account from your account page once your plan no longer renews.

Plans and prices

The free plan runs the free checks. The paid plans run every check, on the map and through the API. No plan limits how many reports you run. Through the API an account starts at most one new report a minute, one at a time. The plans page lists what each plan includes and what it costs.

Searcher and Professional are paid every week, every month, every three months or every year, whichever you choose at the checkout. Every price is the full price in euro. No VAT is added to or shown on any price. RuralCheck is run under the German small-business rule (section 19 UStG), so its invoices carry no VAT. If that changes, prices and invoices will say so. The Business plan is agreed with each customer and is not bought on this site.

How a contract is made

You choose a plan on the plans page, signed in to your account. This takes you to the checkout, a page on this site.
The checkout shows the plan, the price, how often it is charged, how it renews and how to end it. There you choose how often to pay and the country you live in. A consumer buying Searcher ticks the box asking for the plan to start straight away. Before you press the button you can change any of this on the page, or go back to the plans page.
When you press "Buy now", you place a binding order. You are then taken to the page of Mollie, our payment provider, to pay.
The contract is made when the payment has gone through. The plan starts at that moment, and we confirm the contract by email. If the payment does not go through, no contract is made and nothing is charged.

The contract is made in English. We keep the details of your order, and your plan and invoices are on your account page. The confirmation email carries these terms and the page on your right of withdrawal, as they stood when you bought, so you have a copy of your own. Earlier versions of these terms are not published on this site. We have not signed up to any code of conduct.

The checkout cannot take every order. The Professional plan is sold to business customers only. Consumers in the United Kingdom cannot buy a plan at the moment. Where the checkout cannot take an order, it says so before you pay. If you buy as a consumer and pay with a card or bank account from the United Kingdom, no contract is made: we refund the payment in full and the plan does not start.

Payment and renewal

You pay by card, iDEAL or Bancontact, on Mollie's page. You pay the first period when you buy. The plan then renews at the end of each period, at the price shown when you bought it, until you cancel it. Each renewal is charged at the start of its period, the same way you first paid. A plan first paid by iDEAL or Bancontact renews by SEPA direct debit from the same bank account. If a payment fails, Mollie tries again over the next few days and we tell you by email. You keep the plan for 8 days after the end of the period while that happens. If no payment has gone through by then, the plan ends.

A business customer can change a plan on the plans page. A move from Searcher to Professional on the same billing period starts straight away, and you pay the difference for the rest of the period you have paid for. Every other change starts with your next period. A consumer who wants to pay a different way cancels the plan and buys the new one when it has ended, so that each purchase is a contract of its own with its own right of withdrawal.

Every payment gets an invoice, on your account page.

What you get, and how

A plan is a service supplied online, on this site, for as long as the plan runs. It starts as soon as the payment has gone through. Nothing is sent by post. A report is a web page in your account, and on the Professional plan also a PDF of the same content. It needs nothing beyond a current web browser and carries no copy protection. The checks it contains, and what each one can and cannot tell you, are described on the about page before you buy.

Your statutory rights

If the service does not work as these terms and the plans page describe, you have the rights the law gives you. For a consumer these are the rights for digital products in sections 327 to 327u of the German Civil Code (BGB): we put the fault right, and where we cannot, you may pay less or end the contract. Write to us at the address on the imprint. Nothing in these terms limits these rights.

Changes to the service

The data behind the checks changes. A source can be updated, withdrawn or licensed differently, and a calculation can be corrected or improved. We may change a check for those reasons. A change costs you nothing extra. We list every change, with its date, under Changes to the checks on the about page. If a change affects what you can do with your plan more than slightly, we also tell you by email in good time before it takes effect. You may then end the plan within 30 days of being told, or of the change if that comes later, and we refund the rest of the period you have paid for.

Right of withdrawal

The Searcher plan is the one plan sold to consumers. If you buy it as a consumer, you may withdraw from the contract within 14 days. If you asked for the plan to start straight away, you pay for the days you had it and get the rest back. The page on your right of withdrawal sets out how, with a form you may use, and exactly what you ask for when you ask for a plan to start straight away.

What you may do with a report

On every plan you may use a report for your own purposes, including deciding whether to buy a property. You may show it to your own advisers, your bank, a surveyor or the seller.

You may not resell a report as a product of its own, publish it as your own work, or extract the data behind it to build a competing service. Reports may be collected automatically only through the API, with your own key and within its limits.

The aerial photos on the map and in the 3D view come from Esri. Your use of them is also subject to Esri's terms of use.

Reports are built from public datasets whose licences require their sources to be credited. Those credits are listed on the about page and must stay with any copy of a report that you pass on.

Using reports in your work

The Professional and Business plans add a licence to use reports in your work. While your plan is active you may:

give a report to a client who is considering a property
put a report in a listing, or publish it with a property you are selling or letting
use a report to win a listing from a seller
charge for your own services when a report is part of them

A report you pass on must be complete and unchanged. You may add your name, logo and contact details only in the places the PDF provides for them. You may not edit, shorten or reorder what the report says, remove its notes or its credits, or present it as your own work.

Every PDF on these plans carries a client link and a code that open the report as RuralCheck produced it. Keep the link with any copy you pass on. Anyone who has the link can open that report. You can turn a link off in Saved plots, and it then opens nothing for anyone until you turn it on again.

On these plans you can also download a comparison of two to four of your saved plots as a PDF. It sets figures from their reports side by side and carries each plot's client link. What this section says about passing on a report applies to the comparison too.

The licence lasts only while your plan is active. When the plan ends, or changes to one without this licence, the licence ends too. You may then no longer use any report in your work, including reports you have already passed on or published, and every client link stops working. If you take the Professional or Business plan again, the licence and the links come back.

The licence does not cover selling reports on their own, apart from your own services. Building reports into your own website or app, so that its visitors can ask for them, is part of the Business plan and is agreed separately.

The person you give a report to is not a party to these terms. You are responsible for what you tell them about it.

The API

A paid plan includes API keys. With a key, a program or an AI assistant can ask for reports for you, as your account.

What the API returns is a report, and the sections above apply to it. You may use the results for your own purposes, and a program or assistant may read and summarise them for you. On the Searcher plan you may not pass results on to other people. On the Professional and Business plans you may pass a result on to a client in the same way as a report, complete and with its sources. On every plan you may not show results in a website or app, or sell access to them, unless that has been agreed separately. You may not store them to build a dataset or a competing service. Asking for reports over an area point by point to rebuild a map counts as building a dataset.

The sources listed with each result must stay with any copy of it that you keep.

Keep your keys private. You are responsible for what is asked for with them. If you think someone else has a key, revoke it on your account page.

Availability

We aim to keep the site available at all times. Short interruptions for maintenance or a fault can happen. If a report fails, you can ask for it again.

Our liability

We are fully liable for death, personal injury and damage to health, for damage caused intentionally or by gross negligence, and wherever the law does not allow liability to be limited.

For ordinary negligence we are liable only where we break an obligation that the contract depends on and that you are entitled to rely on. In that case our liability is limited to the loss that could typically be expected from this kind of contract.

A report is a set of calculations from public data, and it can be wrong or out of date. It does not replace a survey, a site visit or professional advice before you decide to buy.

Business customers

You are a business customer if you buy for your trade, business or profession. You tell us so on your account page, with the name and address of the business and its VAT ID if it has one. Until you do, we treat you as a consumer. Where this section differs from the rest of these terms, this section applies to business customers.

The Professional plan: The Professional plan is sold to business customers only, because what it adds is a licence to use reports in your work. To buy it, add your business details on your account page first. They stay on the account while the plan runs. The Searcher plan is open to consumers and business customers.
No right of withdrawal: The 14 day right of withdrawal is for consumers only. A business customer cannot withdraw from a plan. You can end a plan at any time with the "Cancel contracts here" link at the foot of every page, and it runs to the end of the period you have paid for.
Invoices: Every payment gets an invoice made out to the business, with the details on your account page on the day it is issued. You agree to receive invoices as PDF files on your account page. We email you each time one is issued. Keep the details up to date.
VAT: No VAT is charged on any plan. For a business in Germany, and for any customer without a confirmed VAT ID, that is because RuralCheck is a small business under section 19 of the German VAT Act. For a business elsewhere in the EU, the reverse charge applies once we have confirmed its VAT ID in the EU VAT register, and you account for the VAT in your own country. Until RuralCheck has a VAT identification number, a business elsewhere in the EU whose VAT ID we have confirmed cannot buy on this site and is asked to write to us. For a business outside the EU, no German VAT is charged and any tax due where you are is yours to account for.
Our liability: The section on our liability applies, with one addition. Where we are liable for ordinary negligence, all claims in one contract year together are limited to the price of one year of the plan you hold, as shown on the plans page when the loss was caused. On the Business plan the limit is the price agreed for a year. The limit does not apply to injury to life, body or health, to damage caused intentionally or by gross negligence, or where the law does not allow liability to be limited.
Reports you pass on: A report is an estimate made automatically from public data. A report you pass on must keep the notes that say so. You may not describe it as a survey, a valuation or legal advice.

Ending a plan

You can end a plan at any time with the "Cancel contracts here" link at the foot of every page. You do not need to sign in or give a reason, and you can also write to us. No more payments are taken, and the plan runs to the end of the period you have paid for. We confirm every cancellation by email straight away.

For a consumer, a plan paid every three months or every year binds you for its first period only. After that first period it ends one month after you cancel, or at the end of the period if that comes first, and we refund the rest of the period. A plan paid every week or every month always runs to the end of its period. Between three months and one month before a plan paid every three months or every year renews, we email you a reminder with the date, the price and how to cancel.

When a plan ends, your account becomes a free account. Your saved plots stay in it and you can still open them. Every check, the 3D explorer, search, saving plots, the API and, on Professional, the PDF and client links work again when you take a paid plan again.

You can delete your account once your plan no longer renews. Any paid time left on a cancelled plan ends with the account.

Either of us may end a plan straight away for an important reason. We may close an account that seriously breaks these terms, after telling you why, and we refund the rest of the period you have paid for.

Law and disputes

German law applies. If you are a consumer, this does not take away any protection you have under the law of the country you live in.

We are not obliged to take part in dispute resolution before a consumer arbitration board, and we do not take part.

Changes to these terms

If these terms change, the date at the top of the page changes with them. The terms that apply to a purchase are the ones published when you made it.