Last updated: 27 August 2026.
These terms of service ("Terms") govern your access to and use of the Company
Watch API and the accompanying documentation (together, the "Service"). By creating an
account, you agree to be bound by these Terms. If you are agreeing on behalf of an organisation,
you confirm you have the authority to bind that organisation, and "you" refers to that
organisation throughout.
If you do not agree to these Terms, do not create an account or use the Service.
1. Who we are
The Service is provided by Akeman Financial Solutions Ltd, trading as Company Watch, a company
registered in England and Wales under company number 13138620, whose
registered office is at 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9JQ ("we",
"us", "our"). You can contact us at
hello@company-watch.co.uk.
2. The Service
Company Watch lets you register specific UK companies you want to keep track of, choose which
types of change you want to hear about, and receive real-time notifications by webhook or
by polling an endpoint on your own schedule. The Service is built on the public data Companies
House publishes about UK-registered companies (see Section 7 below) and is aimed at
organisations with their own technical integration capabilities, not at individual consumers.
We may add, change, or remove features of the Service from time to time and we'll give
reasonable notice of any change that affects existing functionality you're actively using.
3. Accounts
You must provide accurate information when you sign up and keep it up to date. You're
responsible for everything that happens under your account, including actions taken using your
API key. Keep your API key confidential — treat it like a password. If you believe your key has
been compromised, tell us immediately at
hello@company-watch.co.uk and we'll help you
rotate it.
We may suspend or limit access to your account if we reasonably believe it's being used in a
way that risks the security or integrity of the Service, other customers, or Companies House's
own systems, and we'll aim to tell you why as soon as we reasonably can.
4. Fees and payment
Current pricing tiers and what each includes are set out on our pricing
page, which forms part of these Terms. We may change our prices, but not for a subscription
period you've already paid for — a price change takes effect from your next renewal at the
earliest, and we'll give you reasonable notice beforehand.
Paid subscriptions are billed in advance on a recurring basis until cancelled. Upgrading to a
higher tier takes effect immediately, and we'll charge the difference for the remainder of your
current billing period. Downgrading — including cancelling down to the Free tier — takes effect
at the end of your current billing period; you keep your existing tier's limits until then.
Prices shown on our pricing page are exclusive of VAT. Fees already paid are non-refundable,
including for any unused portion of a billing period following a downgrade or cancellation.
5. Acceptable use
You agree not to:
- use the Service to build or operate a product that resells, redistributes, or otherwise
provides third parties with access to the underlying Companies House stream or our processed
feed of it, other than displaying notifications within your own product for your own end users;
- attempt to circumvent any rate limit, tier limit, or authentication control, or access the
Service other than through the documented API;
- reverse engineer, decompile, or attempt to extract the source code of the Service, except to
the extent this restriction is not permitted by law;
- register a webhook URL that isn't genuinely under your control, or that points at internal,
private, or non-public network infrastructure (ours or anyone else's);
- use the Service in a way that places unreasonable load on it, or in any way that is unlawful,
fraudulent, or infringes anyone else's rights; or
- use the Service to make automated decisions about an individual (for example, an automated
credit or onboarding decision) without a human review step, where that would otherwise be
unlawful under applicable data protection law.
If you use the Service as part of your anti-money-laundering, know-your-customer, credit-risk,
or other compliance process, that process — including deciding what counts as adequate ongoing
monitoring for your regulatory obligations — remains entirely yours to own and operate. See
Section 8 below.
6. Your data and content
You retain all rights to the data you configure in your account — your watchlist, webhook
endpoint, and account settings. You give us permission to use that configuration only as needed
to operate the Service for you (for example, matching incoming Companies House events against
your watchlist and delivering them to your webhook).
7. Companies House data — source and accuracy
The change events the Service notifies you about originate from data Companies House makes
available to the public. That data is made available under
the Open Government Licence, and remains subject to Crown copyright and to Companies House's own
terms of use — we don't own it, and using the Service doesn't give you any rights in it beyond
what Companies House itself grants.
We do not create, verify, or take responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness
of the underlying Companies House data itself. We pass on what Companies House publishes, as it
publishes it. If Companies House's own service is unavailable, delayed, or publishes something
incorrect, that is outside our control and we are not responsible for it — though we will tell
you if we become aware of a gap affecting your account (see our
documentation on how ingestion gaps are handled).
Notifications from the Service are informational. They are not, and must not be relied on as a
substitute for your own professional judgement, your own compliance processes, or independent
verification of anything material to a lending, credit, insolvency, AML/KYC, or other regulated
decision. We are not a credit reference agency, are not regulated by the FCA, and do not provide
legal, financial, or compliance advice.
8. Service availability
We aim to keep the Service available and responsive at all times. Should the Service become temporarily unavailable for any reason,
it is designed to recover from unexpected outages without any loss of update notifications.
The Service also depends on Companies House's own systems being available to us; an outage or change on their
side can affect ours, and is not something we can guarantee against.
9. Limitation of liability
Nothing in these Terms limits or excludes our liability for death or personal injury caused by
our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that the law
does not allow us to limit or exclude.
Subject to that, and to the fullest extent permitted by law: we are not liable to you for any
indirect or consequential loss, or for loss of profit, revenue, business, contracts, or
anticipated savings, in each case however it arises; and our total liability to you arising out
of or in connection with these Terms or the Service, whether in contract, tort (including
negligence), or otherwise, is limited to the greater of £100 and the total fees you paid us in
the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim.
The Service is provided "as is" and "as available". To the fullest extent permitted by law, we
exclude all warranties, express or implied, including any warranty that the Service will be
uninterrupted, error-free, or fit for a particular purpose.
10. Data protection
We process personal data — your account details, and personal data that appears in Companies
House's own published records (for example, the names of company officers or people with
significant control) — in order to provide the Service, in line with UK data protection law. See
our Privacy Policy for more detail on what we collect and why.
11. Suspension and termination
You can stop using the Service and close your account at any time. We may suspend or terminate
your access if you materially breach these Terms and don't fix it within a reasonable time of us
telling you (or immediately, for a serious breach — for example, a security risk to the Service
or to other customers), or if you don't pay fees when due.
On termination, your right to use the Service ends immediately.
12. Changes to these Terms
We may update these Terms from time to time. If we make a material change, we'll email the
address on your account and update the "Last updated" date above. Continuing to use the Service
after a change takes effect means you accept the updated Terms.
13. General
These Terms, together with our pricing page, are the entire agreement between us about the
Service and replace any earlier agreement on the same subject. If any part of these Terms is
found unenforceable, the rest continues to apply. If we don't act on a breach immediately, that
doesn't mean we've waived our right to act on it later. You may not transfer your rights under
these Terms without our consent; we may transfer ours, including to a purchaser of our business,
provided your rights under these Terms aren't reduced as a result.
These Terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales
have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them.
14. Contact
Questions about these Terms? Email us at
hello@company-watch.co.uk.