API and File Dumps Documentation

Access and Authentication

To access 42matters API, you must have an API access token and pass it with every request you make. To get an API access token, please sign up for a 42matters account. You will find your API access token on your launchpad after you logged in.

To access 42matters File Dumps, you need File Dumps credentials. Please consult the File Dumps documentation for further details or contact us for an inquiry on how to get access to File Dumps.

Quotas and Features

Paid accounts can consume API resources up to a certain API monthly quota, which is determined by the plan that account is subscribed to. Additionally certain API endpoints and features are only available to specific subscription plans. Trial accounts have restricted access to API features, endpoints and data over a limited time period.

In general, every API request consumes a certain number of hits from your API monthly quota. Complex requests, like API search queries, consumes more hits than other requests, such as API Lookup requests. The number of hits each API request consumes is shown at the respective API endpoint documentation page.

You can view the API usage and quota consumption of your account in your usage overview page or by calling the Account Status API.

File Dumps come in different time-frequency updates (e.g. daily, weekly, monthly), support different platforms, and expose data in different tiers. If you have a paid account and got access to File Dumps, your credentials will only grant you access to the respective File Dumps variant. Please consult the File Dumps documentation for further details or contact us for an inquiry.

Rate Limits and Availability

Rate limits are in place to protect both our users and 42matters from abuse. If an API endpoint allows for 5 requests per second (QPS), then it allows you to make at most 5 requests in that second, and every request after those in that second will get an error 4xx response (see below). The rate limits for each API endpoint are displayed at the respective API documentation page. Please contact us if you require more QPS throughput for API.

Generally, unless otherwise agreed, File Dumps have a download limit of 1 terabyte per month per account. This limit allows for downloading File Dumps data multiple times, thus accommodating most of the use cases from our users. Please contact us if you require a higher download limit for File Dumps.

Excluding downtimes due to maintenance and downtimes due to reasons beyond our control, we will use reasonable efforts to keep the API and File Dumps services available for at least 99% of the time in the average of a calendar quarter. For more details please consult our Terms of Services.

Error Responses

42matters API uses conventional HTTP response status codes to indicate the success or failure of a request. In general, codes in the 2xx range are signs of success, codes in the 4xx range indicate an error at the client side (e.g. a given package name is not valid/existing, too many requests, etc.), and codes in the 5xx range point to an error with 42matters servers.

The body part of an API error response is a JSON object with 3 attributes: statusCode - a repeat of the HTTP status code mentioned above, message - a human readable explanation of the error, and request - the URL clients requested.

Support

In case you need any professional support for using our API or File Dumps that goes beyond this documentation, you can purchase the tech support package as listed on our pricing page. Our experienced team will provide you with professional tech support over email, Slack, phone calls, and more.