Terms and Conditions

1. Acceptance of Terms

By creating an account or otherwise accessing Ortena, you confirm that you are at least 18 years old and have the legal capacity to enter into this agreement. If you are acting on behalf of a municipality, an authority, or a company, you confirm that you are authorised to bind that organisation. Continued use of the Service constitutes acceptance of these Terms and any future updates.

2. Description of Service

Ortena collects, structures, and publishes the fees and charges levied by Swiss municipalities — including tax multipliers, electricity and gas tariffs, waste, water and wastewater charges, health-premium regions, dog tax, and childcare rates. The data is drawn from official federal and cantonal registers, from partner services, and from the fee regulations that municipalities publish themselves. We make it available through this website and through a paid API.

We reserve the right to modify, extend, suspend, or discontinue any part of the Service, including individual data categories and API endpoints, with reasonable notice.

3. Data Rights and Licensing

The underlying facts we publish — the fees and tariffs themselves — originate from official public sources and are not owned by us. Our compilation, structuring, normalisation, and presentation of that data, together with our source lineage records, are our work product and are protected accordingly.

A paid subscription grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to retrieve and use the data within your own products and internal processes for the duration of your subscription. You may not resell, redistribute, or republish substantial parts of the database as a standalone dataset or as a competing service. Where you display our data publicly, attribution to Ortena is required.

If you upload documents to the Service — for example as a verified municipality administrator submitting a fee regulation — you represent and warrant that you are authorised to do so and that the document is an official publication of that municipality. You grant us a licence to process, extract, and publish the fee information it contains, and to cite the document as a source. You agree to indemnify us against any claims arising from a breach of these representations.

4. Service and Availability

We strive to provide a reliable Service but cannot guarantee uninterrupted availability, specific response times, or that any particular municipality or fee category is covered at a given moment.

Fee data is compiled from third-party sources and from documents that municipalities publish on their own schedules. Despite careful extraction and review, we do not warrant that every figure is accurate, complete, or current. Each value carries its source and reference year; where a decision has financial or legal consequences, verify it against the cited original document or with the municipality directly. Ortena is an information service and does not constitute tax, legal, or financial advice.

5. Intellectual Property Rights

All content, design, trademarks, and proprietary features of Ortena are owned by us or our licensors and are protected under applicable copyright and trademark laws. You may not reproduce, distribute, modify, or resell any portion of the Service without prior written consent.

Rights in the underlying public data and in documents you upload are governed by Section 3.

6. Prohibited Content and Use

You may not upload or submit:

• Documents you are not authorised to share or publish
• Documents containing personal data of third parties
• Confidential, internal, or otherwise non-public municipal material
• Documents that violate any third-party intellectual property rights
• Content intended to misrepresent a municipality's fees or to deceive other users
• Malware, or files designed to disrupt our extraction pipeline

You also agree not to:

• Use the Service for unlawful or fraudulent purposes
• Attempt to breach or test our security systems
• Scrape, crawl, or bulk-harvest the website instead of using the API, or circumvent rate limits, quotas, or authentication
• Share API keys with third parties, or resell API access outside the terms of your plan
• Interfere with the proper operation of the Service

We reserve the right to review submitted content, reject processing requests, throttle or revoke API keys, and terminate accounts that violate this policy.

7. Subscriptions and Payments

Browsing municipal data on this website is free. API access is offered on paid subscription plans with differing request quotas and data coverage. By subscribing, you agree to pay all applicable fees as displayed at checkout. Payments are processed securely through Stripe.

Subscriptions are billed in advance on a recurring basis (monthly or annually) and renew automatically until cancelled. You may cancel at any time from your organisation's billing settings; cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period and your access continues until then.

Fees already paid for the current period are not refunded on cancellation, and unused request quota has no cash value and does not carry over. Where a paid feature was substantially unavailable through our fault, contact us and we will make it right. We may change pricing with 30 days' notice; changes take effect at your next renewal.

8. Limitation of Liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Ortena shall not be liable for any indirect, incidental, consequential, or punitive damages, including but not limited to loss of business opportunities, reputational harm, or losses arising from reliance on a published fee, tariff, or tax figure that turns out to be inaccurate or out of date.

Our total liability to you for any claim arising from these Terms or use of the Service shall not exceed the amount you paid us in the 12 months prior to the claim being raised.

9. Modifications and Updates

We may update these Terms or modify the Service from time to time. We will notify you of material changes via email. Continued use of the Service after changes are posted constitutes acceptance of the updated Terms.

10. Governing Law and Jurisdiction

These Terms are governed by Swiss law. Any dispute shall be resolved in the competent courts of Zürich, unless otherwise required by law.

11. Severability

If any provision of these Terms is or becomes invalid or unenforceable, in whole or in part, the remaining provisions shall remain in full force and effect. The invalid or unenforceable provision shall be replaced with a valid provision that most closely reflects the original intent.

12. Contact Information

Responsible for the content and operation of this website:

Email: [email protected]

See also our privacy policy.