Terms and conditions

Who you are agreeing with

FirstBrief is operated by HappyChases Media Works OPC Private Limited, a One Person Company registered in India. In these terms, “we” and “us” mean that company, and “you” means the person using the service. “The service” means the FirstBrief website, its email briefs and its API.

Registered office

Kursi Cowork, 3rd Floor, LK Logistics and Corporate Park, Raipur, Chhattisgarh 492015, India

GSTIN

22AAFCH1697E1ZR

Grievance officer and Data Compliance Officer

[email protected]. Named as the Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules 2020 require, and reachable for data-protection requests under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023. A complaint is acknowledged within 2 working days and answered within one month.

Using the service means accepting these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use it — reading the archive requires no account, so there is nothing to unwind.

What the service is

FirstBrief indexes documents that Indian government bodies and regulators publish — circulars, notifications, orders and similar — and presents them with a short machine-written summary, an assessed impact, any deadline found in the text, the statutes named in it, and the other documents in this archive it refers to or is referred to by.

The underlying documents are the government's, not ours.They are public documents published by the issuing body. Every record links to the official document at its source, and that document is the authoritative text. What we claim as our own work is the indexing, the summaries, the assessments and the arrangement.

Why this clause exists: a reader relying on our rendering of a circular rather than on the circular is relying on the wrong thing, and no wording further down this page can fix a habit formed at the top of it.

Accounts

An account needs a working email address and either a password or a Google sign-in. You are responsible for what happens under your account and for keeping your credentials to yourself. Tell us if you think somebody else has access to it.

We confirm an address before sending anything to it. Until it is confirmed, the account exists but cannot be used.

One person, one account. Sharing an account's credentials so that several people read on one subscription is a breach of these terms, and it is the thing the free allowance is counted against.

What is free and what is not

The regulator pages, the sector pages, the storylines and the front page are open to everyone, signed in or not. So is every circular's identity — its title, its issuing body, its reference number, its dates — along with its summary, any deadline in it, our reading of its impact and the link to the official text.

The circular's own text and the documents it supersedes, continues or names are metered. A free account may open five circulars in full each calendar month. Re-opening one you have already opened never costs a second — the count is of distinct circulars, not of page views — and the allowance returns at the start of each calendar month at 00:00 UTC.

A paid subscription removes the meter and adds the immediate email alert when a circular lands. The morning brief is included on every tier, including the free one.

Why this clause exists: the boundary of a paywall is the thing people argue about afterwards. It is written here in the same words the software enforces it in, so that there is no second version of it.

What is written by a machine, and what that means

The summary, the impact rating, the deadline, the storyline name and the links between circulars are produced by a language model reading the document text. They are not written, checked or approved by a person before they are published. Each of them is labelled on the page where it appears, in these words: a deadline is “extracted automatically from the document text, not confirmed by a person”; a summary is “written from the document by an automated reader”; a storyline says “read the sources before you rely on any of this”. This clause says the same thing and nothing broader.

They can be wrong, and we know the shapes the errors take. A summary can miss a qualification. An extracted deadline can be the wrong date, a date that applies to somebody else, or a date the document does not contain. A document can be assessed as low impact and matter enormously to you. Two circulars can be linked that have nothing to do with each other, and a link that ought to exist can be absent. The same document read twice can be read differently: the extraction is not deterministic, and where our reader could not get clean text out of a file the record says so on its own page.

Nothing on the service is legal, financial, tax or compliance advice, and nothing on it creates a professional relationship between us. The official document at the issuing body's own site is the authoritative text, we link to it on every record, and it is what governs — not our rendering of it. Reading a circular here is not reading the circular.

Checking against the source is your responsibility, and it is the basis on which the service is offered. Before you act, file, diarise a date or advise anybody else on the strength of anything here, open the official document we link to and confirm it there. If the two disagree, the official document is right and we would like to be told.

We give no warranty that anything here is accurate, complete or current. Coverage is a defined set of bodies that we have connected, not “every Indian regulator”, and it is not complete for any period. A circular's absence from FirstBrief is not evidence that it was not published, “nothing in this archive supersedes this document” is a statement about this archive and not about the law, and a document can appear here days after the body published it. The service is provided as it is, and to the extent the law allows we exclude the implied terms an unqualified promise of fitness or accuracy would otherwise import.

Why this clause is written this narrowly: it has to match what the screen says, word for word where it can. A disclaimer in the terms that claims more than the interface admits is the one a court reads down, and the interface's labels are the ones a reader actually sees.

Subscriptions, prices and payment

No subscription can be bought today. The open archive and the free account described above are what the service offers, and nothing on this site can take money from you. This section sets out the terms that apply from the first paid subscription onwards.

Subscriptions are monthly and are charged in Indian rupees. Payments are processed by Razorpay; we do not see or store your card, UPI or bank details. Where a subscription renews automatically, it does so under a mandate you register with your bank or UPI app under the Reserve Bank of India's e-mandate rules, and you can revoke that mandate through your bank or app as well as by cancelling with us.

A mandate is registered with a ceiling above the current price, so that a later price change does not require you to re-authorise it. Registering a ceiling is not a charge and is not permission to charge that amount — we charge the price of your tier and nothing else. If a price changes, we will tell you before the change applies to you.

Prices are shown inclusive or exclusive of applicable taxes as stated on the pricing page at the time. GST is charged where it applies, under the GSTIN above, and a tax invoice is issued for every charge. FirstBrief is an online information service, so for a subscriber in India the place of supply is the address you give us, and for a subscriber outside India it is your location; that is what decides whether IGST, CGST and SGST, or no Indian GST at all, appears on your invoice. Give us the address and, if you have one, the GSTIN you want the invoice made out to — we cannot reissue an invoice to a different entity after the return for that period has been filed.

Cancellation and refunds are covered by the refund and cancellation policy, which forms part of these terms.

What you may and may not do

You may read, quote and cite what is here, and link to any page of it.

• Do not scrape the site in bulk, or use automated means to collect from it at a rate a person could not read at.
• Do not resell, redistribute or republish our summaries, assessments or arrangement as a product of your own. The underlying government documents are public and this does not restrict them.
• Do not share account credentials, or use one subscription to serve an organisation.
• Do not attempt to circumvent the meter, the authentication, or any rate limit.
• Do not use the service in a way that breaks the law, or that interferes with anybody else's use of it.

We may suspend or close an account that breaches these terms. Where a paid subscription is closed for a breach, we will say which term was breached.

Government documents, and what is whose

The circulars, notifications and orders indexed here are published by Indian government bodies and regulators. They are public documents, we reproduce and summarise them so that they can be found and compared, and every record on this site names the issuing body and links to that body's own copy as the authoritative text. Government works in India are the government's copyright; we claim none of it, we do not present ourselves as the publisher, and we are not connected with, endorsed by or speaking for any body whose documents appear here. If a body believes something here misrepresents what it published, write to us and we will correct or remove it.

What is ours is the work around them — the indexing, the summaries, the impact assessments, the extracted deadlines, the relation graph and the arrangement of the whole. That is our copyright, and the clause above about not reselling or republishing it applies to it and not to the underlying documents, which you are free to obtain and use from the source.

Your data, and cookies

What we collect, why, who processes it and how long it is kept is set out in the privacy policy, which forms part of these terms. Cookies that are not strictly necessary are not set unless you accept them, and “Cookie choices” in the footer of every page reopens that choice at any time — withdrawing takes the same one click as giving.

Availability

We do not promise the service will be available without interruption. It depends on sources we do not control — the government websites we ingest from — and on providers we do not control. Sources go down, change their layout, and publish late; when that happens the archive is late too, and the interface says what it does and does not hold rather than pretending.

We may change, suspend or withdraw features. Where a change removes something a paid subscription included, we will tell subscribers before it takes effect.

Liability

We are not liable for what you do or fail to do on the strength of anything on this site. That includes a deadline you missed, a filing you did not make, a circular we had not ingested, a summary that was wrong, and an impact rating that understated something.

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited in law, including for fraud, for wilful misconduct, and for death or personal injury caused by negligence. Nothing in them limits a right you have as a consumer under the Consumer Protection Act 2019 that cannot be contracted out of.

Subject to that, and to the extent the law allows: we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for loss of profit, revenue, business or goodwill, or for a penalty, interest or fine imposed on you by somebody else; and our total liability to you for all claims connected with the service, taken together, is limited to the amount you actually paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose. For a free account that is nothing, and the service is free precisely so that this is clear before you rely on it.

Why the cap is drawn to the fees rather than to a token figure: a cap set absurdly low is one a court can strike out altogether, which would leave no cap at all. This one is the ordinary measure for a subscription service and it is meant to survive being read.

If you republish what you take from here, you carry that. Where you pass our summaries, deadlines or assessments on to a client, an employer or the public as though they were checked, and somebody brings a claim against us because of what you passed on, you will cover our reasonable costs of defending it. This does not apply to anything caused by our own breach of these terms, and it does not apply to you simply using the service.

Ending it

You can stop using the service at any time. You can cancel a subscription as described in the refund and cancellation policy.

To close an account entirely, erase it from your account settings. It happens immediately and cannot be undone, and the page lists what is removed and what is kept before you confirm. It refuses in one case — an account with a live subscription, because a payment mandate cannot be cancelled from inside the product. Revoke the mandate at your bank or UPI app, or write to [email protected] from the address on the account, and we will erase it. What is erased and what is retained, and why payment records are retained, is set out in the privacy policy.

Changes to these terms

We may change these terms. The date at the foot of this page is the date of the current version. A change that materially affects a paying subscriber will be sent to them by email before it takes effect, and a subscriber who does not accept it can cancel.

Law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of India. The courts at Raipur, Chhattisgarh have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them, consistent with the registered office above. Nothing in this clause takes away a consumer's statutory right to complain to the consumer forum where they live.

Complain to us first. Write to the grievance officer named at the top of this page: [email protected]. A complaint is acknowledged within 2 working days and answered within one month, as the Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules 2020 require. Most things are a misunderstanding about what the archive holds, and those are quicker to fix than to argue about.