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Own what you look up

A coordinate you paid for is not automatically a coordinate you may keep. Metered geocodinggeocodingThe process of converting an address into geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude). Mailwoman geocodes in a multi-tier cascade: exact address-point match → street interpolation → locality centroid. Each tier is progressively coarser but more widely available. is licensed rather than sold, and the terms commonly reach past the request itself to three further questions: how long you may cache a result, whether you may store it beside the record it belongs to, and whether you may pass it on. The answers vary by provider and by plan, this page quotes none of them, and the only authority on yours is your own agreement. Read it before you design around an assumption.

Those terms shape your architecture. A cache window turns a one-time cost into a recurring one for a set of addresses that never changed, and a redistribution clause sits between your warehouse and every column derived from it. The landscape states the same trade from the engineering side.

What changes​

Mailwoman is AGPL-3.0 software that runs on your infrastructure. A geocode is a local read against files on your disk, so the result is an output of a program you are running rather than a deliverable someone licensed to you. Cache it permanently, join it to the record it came from, index it, and ship it inside your own product, subject to the data terms below. There is no per-result grant to track and no expiry to schedule.

The commercial license changes one thing about that and leaves the rest alone: it releases you from the AGPL's source-sharing condition, so your own source stays private. Published AGPL releases stay licensed to you permanently, which follows from the license itself — a grant already made cannot be withdrawn.

What you still carry​

The code license and the data license are separate questions, and only the first one is ours. The reference data comes from open sources with their own terms, and some of those follow the data into your product. Two specifics belong in a review rather than in a footnote. The OpenStreetMapOpenStreetMap (OSM). A community-curated global map database (ODbL-licensed) with addr:* tagged features and place hierarchies. A secondary corpus source and a source of street names. precisionprecisionOf the spans the model labeled as a given tag, the fraction it got right. High precision means few false positives. Paired with recall to compute F1. tier is built but not enabled in any published artifact, so nothing you install today carries an ODbL obligation from it. And Who's On FirstWOF (Who's On First). An open-source gazetteer of places maintained by Mapzen/whosonfirst. Mailwoman builds a custom SQLite database from WOF GeoJSON repos, extended with postcode data, importance scores, and coincident-role relations. is recorded as CC0 in one of our own files and as CC-BY 4.0 in another; until that is settled, attribute Who's On FirstWOF (Who's On First). An open-source gazetteer of places maintained by Mapzen/whosonfirst. Mailwoman builds a custom SQLite database from WOF GeoJSON repos, extended with postcode data, importance scores, and coincident-role relations.. Both are written out, with the artifacts that carry them, on Security and compliance.

Next​

  • Your first ten minutes — geocode an address on your own machine and keep the output.
  • Pricing — what the release from the AGPL's source-sharing condition costs.