Terms of Service

Effective 28 August 2026

These terms are an agreement between you and ArSite ("ArSite", "we", "us"), operated by ArgonBI, for use of arsite.ca and everything on it, including the ArSite API.

By creating an account, using ArSite, or calling the ArSite API, you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use ArSite.

1. What ArSite is, and what it is not

ArSite publishes relative wildfire risk information for British Columbia. It shows how ready the landscape is to burn in one place compared with another, on a grid, refreshed from weather, fuel and terrain data. Alongside it we show air quality, satellite heat detections, and active incidents published by the BC Wildfire Service.

ArSite is not an emergency service and must never be used as one.

ArSite does not issue evacuation orders, alerts or warnings, and does not receive them in real time.
ArSite does not tell you whether you are safe, whether to leave, or when to return.
The relative risk score — published as an IGNIS Rank — is a ranking for comparing places. It is not a probability, a percentage chance of fire, or a prediction that a fire will or will not occur anywhere.
The smallest unit ArSite models is a 5 km grid cell. A reading is not a property-level assessment, a site inspection, an insurance appraisal, or professional advice of any kind.
Satellite heat detections show where a satellite observed heat on a past overpass. Cloud hides fires, detections lag reality by hours, and some heat sources are not wildfires at all. An empty map does not mean nothing is burning.

In an emergency, call 911. For evacuation orders and alerts, follow EmergencyInfoBC. For wildfire status, follow the BC Wildfire Service. Where anything on ArSite differs from those sources, those sources are correct and ArSite is not.

You agree not to rely on ArSite as your sole or primary source of information for any decision affecting life, health, property or safety.

2. Your account

You need an account for some features. You must give accurate information, keep your credentials secure, and be responsible for activity under your account. You must be old enough to form a binding contract where you live.

We may suspend or close an account that breaches these terms, or that we reasonably believe is being used to harm ArSite or other people.

3. Free and paid features

Some of ArSite is free to read without an account. Some requires a free account. Some requires a paid upgrade.

Where we offer lifetime access to consumer premium features for a one-time payment, "lifetime" means for as long as ArSite continues to operate that consumer product. It does not oblige us to operate ArSite indefinitely, and it does not cover separate products we may offer later, including commercial, enterprise or API products.

We may add, change, or withdraw features. If we withdraw a paid feature you have bought and offer no comparable replacement, contact us and we will deal with it fairly.

4. Payment

Payments are processed by Stripe. We do not receive or store your full card details.

Prices are shown before you pay and are in Canadian dollars unless stated otherwise. You are responsible for any applicable taxes.

If something goes wrong with a purchase, contact us. We will consider refund requests in good faith and in line with applicable consumer protection law, including the Business Practices and Consumer Protection Act (BC).

5. The ArSite API

These terms apply to the API in full. This section adds to them.

Your key is yours alone. An API key identifies you. Keep it secret, do not embed it in client-side code or a public repository, do not share it, and do not let another person or organisation call the API on your key. You are responsible for every call made with it. Tell us promptly if you believe a key has been exposed, and rotate it.

One allowance per account. Usage limits apply to the account, not to the individual key. Rotating, adding or replacing keys does not reset an allowance, and holding more than one key does not increase it. Creating additional accounts to obtain additional free allowance is a breach of these terms.

Plans define what you may call. The free plan serves a defined subset of operations and a defined subset of fields within each response. We may change the composition of any plan, including what the free plan returns, on notice in the product or the published API description. Fields absent from your plan are not to be inferred, reconstructed, or obtained by any other route.

No service level on the free plan. The free plan is provided without any availability, latency, throughput or support commitment, and may be rate limited, degraded, suspended or withdrawn at any time. Paid plans carry only the commitments their own written agreement states.

Attribution travels with the data. ArSite output incorporates third-party data (see section 8). If you display, publish or otherwise pass on ArSite output, you must preserve the attributions and comply with the underlying licences, and you must not present the output in a way that suggests endorsement by, or origin from, any government agency or data publisher.

Caching and redistribution. You may cache responses for the operation of your own application. You may not resell, sublicense, redistribute in bulk, or make ArSite output available as a substitute for ArSite, and you may not use it to train a model or to build a product that competes with ArSite. Bulk, commercial or high-volume use requires a separate written agreement.

Automated and agent access. Where you connect ArSite through an AI assistant, agent framework or similar automated client, including through our MCP interface, you remain responsible for what that client does with your credentials and for every call it makes. Output reaching an automated system carries exactly the same limits as output reaching a person: it is a relative ranking, not a probability, and it is not an emergency communication.

We may suspend for abuse. We may throttle, suspend or revoke a key or an account, without notice where necessary, to protect the service, our upstream data providers, or other users — including for circumventing limits, for scraping, or for a pattern of use that threatens availability.

6. Acceptable use

Do not:

Use ArSite for anything unlawful, or to harm, harass or endanger anyone.
Scrape, bulk-download, resell or redistribute ArSite data except as expressly permitted, or use it to build a competing product, or to train a machine-learning model.
Circumvent access controls, rate limits, quotas, authentication or payment, including by creating multiple accounts.
Present ArSite output as an official emergency communication, or as the output of a government agency.
Represent ArSite output as a property-level risk assessment, an insurance determination, or professional advice.
Interfere with the service or the infrastructure it runs on.

Commercial and high-volume use requires a separate agreement. Contact us.

7. Content you provide

You keep ownership of what you put into ArSite: saved locations, trips, names and similar. You grant us the permission we need to store and process it in order to run the service for you.

If you share a trip or location using a share link, you are choosing to make that content available to anyone holding the link. Share links can be revoked, but we cannot recover information already seen by someone.

8. Our content, the engine, and third-party sources

ArSite's own analysis, design, product and code are ours and are protected by copyright and other rights. These terms give you permission to use the service, not ownership of it.

ArSite is built on the INFERNIS environmental risk engine. Parts of that engine's fire science are published as open source under their own licence. That licence governs your use of that published source code and nothing else: it grants no right to the ArSite service, to our data, to our infrastructure, or to any output of the hosted platform, and running the open-source engine yourself creates no relationship with ArSite.

ArSite incorporates information from third parties, including the BC Wildfire Service and other Province of British Columbia open data, Environment and Climate Change Canada, Natural Resources Canada, NASA FIRMS satellite fire detections, Copernicus programme data, OpenStreetMap contributors, and Esri and its imagery suppliers. That information belongs to its publishers and is used under their respective licences. We attribute those sources in the product. Their licences govern their data, and their accuracy is theirs, not ours.

9. Availability

We aim to keep ArSite available and current, but we do not promise uninterrupted service. Upstream data can be delayed, degraded or wrong, and we may show information that is stale or incomplete. We may change or suspend the service for maintenance or any other reason.

Where a data source is unavailable or stale, ArSite is designed to say so rather than present old information as current. That design is not a warranty that it will always succeed in doing so.

10. No warranty

ArSite is provided "as is" and "as available". To the fullest extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, completeness, timeliness and non-infringement.

Nothing in these terms excludes rights you have under applicable consumer protection law that cannot lawfully be excluded.

11. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, ArSite and ArgonBI are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, punitive or exemplary damages, or for any loss of profit, revenue, data, property or goodwill, arising from your use of, or inability to use, ArSite.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, our total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to ArSite is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, or CAD $100.

This section does not limit liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including for fraud or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.

12. Indemnity

You agree to indemnify us against claims, losses and reasonable legal costs arising from your breach of these terms, your misuse of ArSite, your redistribution or display of ArSite output, or your unlawful use of information obtained from ArSite.

13. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. If we make a material change we will give notice in the product and, where we hold your email address and you have an account, by email. Continuing to use ArSite after a change takes effect means you accept the updated terms. If you do not accept them, stop using ArSite and close your account.

14. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the Province of British Columbia and the applicable laws of Canada. The courts of British Columbia have jurisdiction, without limiting any right you have to bring a claim in your own place of residence where the law gives you that right.

15. Contact

Questions about these terms: [email protected]