Terms of Service
Last updated 2026-10-29
1. Who operates PlotDR
PlotDR is operated by Help Comptabilité & Immobilier Sàrl, Chemin du vallon 18, 3960 Sierre, Valais, Switzerland (“PlotDR”, “we”, “us”). See our Legal Notice for full registration details.
2. What PlotDR is and is not
PlotDR is a geospatial screening tool. Given a plot geometry, we check it against a fixed set of open satellite datasets and return a compliant / needs-review / non-compliant verdict.
These are the datasets we screen against, and what each one can do to your verdict:
| Dataset | Source | Effect on the verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Tree-cover loss, tree-cover gain, tree canopy at 2000, land/water mask | Hansen/UMD Global Forest Change | Confirmed loss after 31 December 2020 on land that had at least 10 % tree canopy at the 2000 baseline is the only signal that produces an automated non-compliant verdict. |
| Integrated deforestation alerts (GLAD-L, GLAD-S2, RADD) | Global Forest Watch | An alert produces needs review. Never an automated fail. |
| Fire alerts | NASA FIRMS | A fire alert on or near the plot produces needs review. Never an automated fail. |
| Natural Lands map | SBTN | On its own, an overlap with the binary map never changes your verdict; the classification map below is the only SBTN signal that can. A failure to resolve this layer does (see below). |
| Natural Lands map (2020 classification), combined with Hansen tree-cover loss | SBTN | Tree-cover loss detected after 31 December 2020 on land the SBTN 2020 baseline maps as natural forest produces needs review. Never an automated fail. The map may include agroforestry, so this signal asks you to confirm land use at the cutoff date; it does not conclude that deforestation occurred. Plantation and planted-forest conversion (SBTN class 14) and short vegetation are not covered by this signal. |
| Primary forest extent (2001 baseline) | GLAD, University of Maryland | Informational: an overlap here never changes your verdict, though a failure to resolve this layer does (see below). |
| Peatland extent | Peat-ML | Informational: an overlap here never changes your verdict, though a failure to resolve this layer does (see below). |
| Vegetation disturbance alerts (DIST-ALERT) | NASA OPERA | Informational: neither a signal here nor a failure to resolve this layer changes your verdict. It flags vegetation-cover decrease of any land-cover type, not forest conversion specifically, so it would fire on ordinary harvest and tillage on compliant farmland. |
| Annual vegetation disturbance summaries (DIST-ANN), 2023 onward | NASA OPERA | Informational: neither a signal here nor a failure to resolve this layer changes your verdict. It records confirmed vegetation-cover decrease of any land-cover type for each calendar year from 2023, with the date each disturbance was first detected, so it also records ordinary harvest and tillage on compliant farmland. It has no annual summary for 2021 or 2022 (a disturbance first detected in 2022 and confirmed in 2023 can appear with its 2022 date), and a year appears only once NASA publishes its annual summary and our yearly update has copied it. Because its records start in 2023, two years after the EUDR cut-off date of 31 December 2020, it cannot show whether land was cleared before or after that date. |
Two further cases, so that a verdict is never a surprise:
- If any dataset cannot be resolved for your plot, or is past its expected freshness, the verdict is needs review regardless of everything else, including for the informational datasets above, whose signals never move a verdict but whose availability does. Both OPERA layers are the exception: they are excluded from this rule too, so neither their signals nor their availability can move your verdict. The per-layer breakdown in your report says which dataset and why.
- Protected areas are not screened. WDPA protected-area data is excluded until we hold a licence covering commercial use; see section 9.
A PlotDR report is one input to your own Article 10 risk assessment under the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR). It is not a substitute for your own due diligence, and it is not a legal compliance guarantee. It does not assess land-rights legality, labor conditions, or most of the non-geospatial due-diligence criteria EUDR requires. In particular, it does not take into account the risk category (low, standard or high) that the European Commission assigns to the country of production, or part of it, under EUDR Article 29: that category is not an input to the verdict, so a plot in a high-risk country is screened exactly as one in a low-risk country. A report therefore does not tell you whether simplified due diligence under Article 13, or the simplified regime for micro or small primary operators under Article 4a, applies to you. Nor does it check that your coordinates have at least six decimal digits, as EUDR Article 2(28) requires: we accept and screen the geometry as you submit it, without adding precision it does not have. You remain solely responsible for your own compliance with EUDR and any other applicable law.
3. Who may use PlotDR
PlotDR is offered to organisations subject to due-diligence obligations under the EU Deforestation Regulation, and to their advisers. You must be at least 18 years old and authorised to accept these terms on behalf of the organisation you register.
PlotDR is offered exclusively to businesses, non-profit organisations and public bodies acting in the course of their professional activity, and to their professional advisers. It is not offered to consumers, and by registering you confirm that you are not acting as a consumer. The consumer-protection provisions of Swiss and EU law, including the statutory right of withdrawal for distance contracts, therefore do not apply to your use of the service.
4. Acceptable use
You agree not to:
- submit plot geometries or supplier data you have no right to process;
- use the service to make automated decisions about individuals;
- circumvent, or attempt to circumvent, the usage quotas or rate limits described in section 5, including by registering multiple organisations to obtain additional free-tier allowance;
- probe, scan, or load-test the service, or attempt to gain unauthorised access to it or to another customer’s data;
- resell, sublicense, or expose the service to third parties as your own screening product, except as we have agreed with you in writing;
- share an API key outside your organisation, or use one from an untrusted environment. You are responsible for everything done with your organisation’s credentials.
5. Fair use, quotas and rate limits
The Free plan includes 200 checks per calendar month, counted per organisation and reset at the start of each calendar month (UTC). A batch submission counts every item in it against that allowance. Once the allowance is exhausted, further checks are refused until the next month or until you upgrade to a paid plan.
All plans, including paid ones, are additionally subject to reasonable request-rate limits sized per plan. These protect service availability for every customer rather than acting as a commercial lever, and we may adjust them, with notice under section 12 where the change is material, to keep the service stable. We will tell you the current limits for your plan on request.
6. Service provided “as is”
The service is provided “as is” and “as available,” without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including without limitation warranties of accuracy, completeness, merchantability, or fitness for a particular purpose. We do not warrant that a “compliant” verdict means your product is in fact deforestation-free under EUDR, or that a “non-compliant” or “needs review” verdict is free of false positives.
7. Liability
To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, our total liability arising out of or relating to these terms or the service, whether in contract, tort or otherwise, is limited to the greater of (a) the fees you paid us for the service in the twelve months preceding the event giving rise to the claim and (b) CHF 100. This limit does not apply to liability for intent or gross negligence, or to any other liability that cannot be limited under Swiss law. We are not liable for indirect, incidental, consequential, or punitive damages, including lost profits or regulatory fines, arising from your use of or reliance on the service. Liability arising out of or relating to our Data Processing Agreement is governed solely by the separate limit in its section 10.
8. Subscriptions and billing
PlotDR offers a Free plan and paid Pro (€19/month) and API Pro (€69/month) plans, described in full on our Pricing page. All prices are exclusive of VAT and any other applicable taxes, which are added at checkout where they apply. All payments for paid subscriptions are processed through Stripe, our payment processor. We do not process or store your payment card details ourselves. You may cancel a paid subscription at any time; cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period, and, except where section 13 or section 5.2 of our Data Processing Agreement provides otherwise, we do not refund the unused remainder of a period you have already paid for.
9. Third-party data
The datasets listed in section 2 are each published under their own third-party terms, most of them open licences. Nothing in these terms grants you any rights in the underlying third-party datasets beyond what their own licences already permit. For each dataset whose licence conditions are settled, every check response and every generated report carries the attribution that licence requires, so the credit travels with the result rather than living only here.
We do not use WDPA protected-area data commercially without a separate licence, and it is excluded from screening until such a licence is obtained. This is why section 2 says protected areas are not screened, and why a compliant verdict never claims a protected-area check ran.
We may withdraw a dataset from screening at any time, for example if its terms change or cannot be confirmed on the basis we need. If we do, your reports stop including it, and if the dataset was one that could affect a verdict we will say so in section 2.
10. Data processing
Where we process personal data on your behalf, in particular the supplier, plot and check data you submit for screening, our Data Processing Agreement applies. It forms part of these terms and is accepted with them. Our Privacy Policy describes the processing for which we are ourselves the controller, such as your organisation’s account and billing data.
11. Your account, and what deleting it does
An organisation administrator can delete the whole organisation from the dashboard at any time. Deletion is immediate and irreversible: every login and API key is revoked at once, and the organisation cannot be recovered or re-opened. We also cancel any active paid subscription as part of the same action, so that you are not charged again. Deletion completes even if our payment processor is unreachable at that moment, so if you do see a further charge, tell us and we will refund it.
You choose, at the point of deletion, what happens to the screening data:
- Archive (default). Suppliers and plots are archived and checks kept. They become inaccessible to you, then are purged once their retention periods have elapsed. This is the option that keeps your own EUDR records available to you on request during those periods.
- Delete everything now. Suppliers, plots, checks and generated reports are erased immediately, including the stored report files. Copies remain in our encrypted backups until they roll off, up to about 12 months, as our Data Processing Agreement (section 9) describes.
Unless you choose immediate deletion, we keep screening records to support the record-keeping the EU Deforestation Regulation requires of you (Art. 9(1)): each check for six years from the screening it records, which allows up to one year between screening and placing on the market or export, and each archived supplier and plot for five years from its archiving, or longer while a check on it is still kept. These periods also run while your subscription is active, not only after you delete your organisation. When you archive a supplier, its plots are archived with it. Every record is therefore kept for at least five years from its screening or archiving. Reports go with the checks they cover: a report for a single check is purged with that check, and a report for a batch of checks once every check in it has been purged. If a product is placed on the market or exported later, or you need a record for longer, export it before its retention period ends: you remain responsible for keeping the records the EUDR requires of you.
We purge records in the first periodic retention review after their retention period ends, and we run that review at least every six months. As our Privacy Policy explains, that purge is a policy commitment we operationalise through a periodic internal review, not an automatic deletion the instant a retention period elapses; you can ask us to erase specific records sooner at any time. If you delete everything now, you lose the records EUDR may require you to be able to produce, and we cannot reconstruct them. Your user accounts are anonymised rather than deleted in both cases, so that the record of who ran a given due-diligence check survives; see the Privacy Policy for what that means in data-protection terms.
12. Changes to these terms
We may change these terms. The revision date at the top of this page always states which version is current, and each account records the version in force when it was created.
Where a change materially affects your rights or obligations, we will notify organisation administrators by email before it takes effect, and continuing to use the service after that date means you accept the revised terms. Non-material changes (corrections, clarifications, and updates to the descriptive parts of this document) take effect on publication. If you do not accept a material change, your remedy is to stop using the service and delete your organisation under section 11.
13. Suspension and termination
We may suspend or terminate access to the service, in whole or in part, where:
- you materially breach these terms, in particular section 4;
- your use threatens the security, integrity or availability of the service for other customers; or
- we are required to do so by law.
Where circumstances allow, we will give you notice and an opportunity to remedy the breach first; where they do not, such as an active security threat or a legal requirement, we may act immediately and notify you afterwards. Suspension does not erase your data: it remains subject to the retention periods in section 11.
Non-payment works differently. If payment for a paid plan fails we email you about it, and your subscription stays active while our payment processor retries it over the following weeks. you keep your paid plan throughout, and updating your payment method in that window restores it. If it is still unpaid when those retries are exhausted, the subscription is cancelled and your organisation reverts to the Free plan and its allowances; you can subscribe again at any time to get the paid plan back. Either way you do not lose access, and your data is not deleted.
We may also discontinue the service as a whole, on at least 30 days’ notice to organisation administrators, with a pro-rata refund of any prepaid period not yet used. You may terminate at any time under section 8 (cancel a subscription) or section 11 (delete the organisation).
14. Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of Switzerland, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles. The courts of the Canton of Valais, Switzerland have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising from these terms, except where mandatory consumer-protection law provides otherwise.
15. Not legal advice
Nothing on this site or in a PlotDR report constitutes legal advice. Consult qualified counsel for advice on your specific EUDR compliance obligations.