Terms of Use

1. What the Service does

SharedRates processes publicly available data that commercial health insurers in the United States are required to publish under the federal Transparency in Coverage rule, along with other public datasets (including the CMS NPPES provider registry, the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule, U.S. Census / ACS data, and HRSA shortage-area designations). We filter, enrich, and present that data so that behavioral health providers can see how their negotiated reimbursement rates compare to peers in their area. The Service includes a free rate check and paid “Rate Reports”.

2. Informational purposes only: not professional advice

The Service, including all reports, letters, benchmarks, and recommendations, is provided for informational purposes only. SharedRates is not a law firm, accounting firm, tax advisor, financial advisor, insurance broker, insurance consultant, billing service, credentialing service, or healthcare provider. Nothing we provide constitutes legal, tax, accounting, financial, medical, billing, contracting, or negotiation advice. You are solely responsible for decisions you make about your panel participation, contract negotiations, and practice operations. If you need professional advice, consult an appropriately licensed professional in your jurisdiction.

3. Data accuracy and limitations

We take data quality seriously, but there are real limits to what we can promise. By using the Service, you acknowledge and agree to the following:

• Data is sourced from insurers. Negotiated rates come from machine-readable files that insurers publish themselves. We do not generate the underlying rates; we process and present them. Errors, omissions, or inconsistencies in the source files (including incorrect rates, duplicate entries, or stale records) will flow through to our reports. We cannot independently verify every rate against any provider’s actual contract.
• Coverage is incomplete. Not all insurers publish usable individual-practitioner (professional) rates in their machine-readable files, and some publish incomplete or non-standard data. If an insurer does not provide usable data, we cannot include them. The Service does not cover every payer in every market.
• Published rates may differ from your actual payment. Machine-readable file rates reflect what is in an insurer’s filed rate schedule. Your actual reimbursement may differ because of modifiers, place-of-service adjustments, plan-specific fee schedules, risk-adjustment arrangements, bonus or value-based payments, retroactive adjustments, or contract amendments that are not captured in the underlying files.
• Cleaning and filtering involve judgment. We exclude records that appear clearly erroneous (for example, $0 rates or implausibly high or low values) using statistical thresholds. Those thresholds are judgment calls, not exact science, and are described in our methodology documentation. Where the source data contains more than one rate that could apply, we may choose one of them to display and compare, and it is possible that we choose the wrong one.
• Some figures are modeled estimates. Market saturation, demand indicators, covered-lives ratios, and the Panel Opportunity Map combine several public datasets (including Census population, ACS insurance coverage estimates, and HRSA designations). These are useful approximations, not counts of actual insurer enrollees at a ZIP-code or metro level.
• Peer groups are approximations. Our benchmarks group providers by credential type and geographic area. We also try to compare providers with other providers in similarly sized practices, but those matches are based on our best efforts. Machine-readable files do not include years of experience, specialty sub-focus, or similar factors that may legitimately affect rates. Two providers in the same peer group may differ along dimensions the data cannot capture.
• No outcome is guaranteed. We cannot predict whether you will receive a rate increase, whether a panel is accepting new providers, or how any particular insurer will respond to a rate review request. In rare cases, drawing an insurer’s attention to your rates could surface information that works against you (for example, if a legacy contract has you paid above the insurer’s typical range). You use this information at your own discretion.

Reports are best understood as a strong approximation of relative positioning, not a guarantee of exact dollar amounts, and not a forecast of what you will earn.

4. Rate Reports, payment, and access

Rate Reports are sold on a one-time basis at the price displayed at checkout (currently US$99), plus any applicable taxes. A link from a partner or a colleague may apply a discount to that price; any discount is shown before you pay, and one discount applies per purchase. Payment is processed by Stripe; we do not store full payment card details. After successful payment, we deliver a secure access link to the email address you provide. Your report link stays active for 12 months after purchase. You are responsible for keeping your access link confidential; anyone with the link can view the report.

Your purchase also includes up to four quarterly update emails over that 12-month period, describing how your rates and your area’s rates have moved since your report was built. Quarterly updates are light, informational emails, not a new or refreshed report, and you can opt out of them at any time without affecting your report access. A new Rate Report is a separate purchase.

Satisfaction guarantee. If you’re not satisfied with your Rate Report for any reason, email us at support@sharedrates.com within 30 days of purchase and let us know what you weren’t satisfied with (we use your feedback to improve the product) and we’ll refund you. Outside that 30-day window, and except where required by applicable law, purchases are non-refundable.

5. Taxes

Prices shown are exclusive of sales, use, value-added, goods-and-services, or similar taxes, which will be added at checkout if applicable.

6. Eligibility

You must be at least 18 years old and able to form a binding contract to use the Service. The Service is intended for licensed or soon-to-be-licensed behavioral health professionals and people assisting them. You represent that any NPI, email, or other information you submit is yours or that you are authorized to submit it.

7. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• Access the Service by automated means (including scrapers, bots, or crawlers) except as permitted by our robots.txt or with our prior written consent;
• Resell, redistribute, sublicense, rent, or otherwise commercially exploit the Service or any report, benchmark, or output derived from it, except that you may share your own Rate Report with your own advisors and colleagues for your own negotiation purposes;
• Reverse engineer, decompile, or attempt to derive the source code, underlying datasets, or algorithms of the Service;
• Submit another person’s NPI or personal information without authorization;
• Use the Service to harass, defame, or harm any provider or entity, or to support any decision that violates applicable anti-discrimination or anti-kickback laws;
• Attempt to bypass access controls, tamper with reports, impersonate another user, introduce malware, or interfere with the integrity or availability of the Service;
• Use the Service in violation of any applicable export control, sanctions, or other law, or while located in a jurisdiction subject to comprehensive U.S. or Canadian sanctions.

8. Intellectual property and your license

The Service, including the software, design, written content, methodology, benchmark calculations, and aggregated presentations, is owned by SharedRates or its licensors and is protected by intellectual property laws. The underlying insurer rate files and other public datasets are not owned by SharedRates. Subject to these Terms, we grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable license to use the Service and your Rate Report for your own personal or internal business purposes as a behavioral health provider or prospective provider. All other rights are reserved.

9. Content you submit

When you submit information (such as your NPI, email, credential, ZIP code, feedback, or responses to interest forms), you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free license to use that information to operate, improve, and secure the Service, to communicate with you, and to create de-identified and aggregated analyses. How we handle personal information is described in our Privacy Policy.

10. Third-party services and links

The Service relies on third-party providers (including, for example, Stripe for payments, Resend for email delivery, Vercel for web hosting, Amazon Web Services for database and data-processing infrastructure, and Cloudflare for DNS and network security) and may link to third-party websites. Your use of those third-party services is governed by their own terms and privacy policies. We are not responsible for third-party services or content.

11. Changes to the Service or these Terms

We may modify, suspend, or discontinue any part of the Service at any time. We may update these Terms from time to time; when we do, we will post the updated version on this page and update the “Last updated” date above. Your continued use of the Service after a change takes effect means you accept the updated Terms. If you already purchased a Rate Report, changes will not retroactively affect your access rights to that report.

12. Disclaimer of warranties

To the maximum extent permitted by law, the Service and all data, reports, letters, and outputs are provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, whether express, implied, or statutory. SharedRates expressly disclaims all warranties, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, accuracy, completeness, timeliness, and uninterrupted or error-free operation. We make no representation that any benchmark, estimate, projection, or recommendation will produce any particular financial or contractual outcome for you.

13. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, in no event will SharedRates or its directors, officers, employees, agents, or affiliates be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for any lost profits, lost revenue, lost contracts, lost data, or business interruption, arising out of or related to the Service or these Terms, whether based on contract, tort (including negligence), strict liability, or any other legal theory, and whether or not SharedRates has been advised of the possibility of such damages.

Our aggregate liability to you for all claims arising out of or related to the Service or these Terms will not exceed the greater of (a) the amount you paid to SharedRates in the twelve (12) months before the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) one hundred U.S. dollars (US$100). Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion or limitation of certain damages, so some of the above limitations may not apply to you; in those jurisdictions, our liability is limited to the minimum extent permitted by law.

14. Indemnification

You will defend, indemnify, and hold harmless SharedRates and its directors, officers, employees, and agents from and against any claims, damages, liabilities, costs, and expenses (including reasonable attorneys’ fees) arising out of or related to (a) your use of the Service, (b) any information you submit, (c) any rate increase letter or other communication you send to any third party based on a report or draft generated by the Service, or (d) your breach of these Terms or of any applicable law or contract, including any confidentiality clause in your insurer contracts.

15. Termination

We may suspend or terminate your access to the Service at any time, with or without notice, if we believe you have violated these Terms or if we are required to do so by law. Sections that by their nature should survive termination (including Sections 2, 3, 7–9, and 12–18) will survive.

16. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Province of Ontario and the federal laws of Canada applicable in Ontario, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules. You and SharedRates agree to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts located in Toronto, Ontario for any dispute not subject to arbitration or small-claims court, except that either party may seek injunctive or other equitable relief in any court of competent jurisdiction to protect its intellectual property or confidential information. Nothing in this section limits any non-waivable rights you may have under the mandatory consumer-protection laws of your place of residence.

17. Notice to United States users

SharedRates is a Canadian company. When you purchase a Rate Report or submit information from the United States, your data will be processed and stored in Canada, the United States, or other jurisdictions where our service providers operate. By using the Service, you consent to the transfer and processing of your information outside your state or country of residence, subject to the protections described in our Privacy Policy. You are responsible for complying with U.S. federal and state laws that apply to you and to your professional practice.

18. Miscellaneous

These Terms, together with our Privacy Policy and any order confirmation, are the entire agreement between you and SharedRates regarding the Service. If any provision is found unenforceable, the remainder will stay in effect. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver. You may not assign these Terms without our written consent; we may assign them to an affiliate or successor.

19. Contact

Questions about these Terms? 1001570949 Ontario Corporation
Attn: Legal
3 Hamel Ave, Guelph, Ontario, Canada
legal@sharedrates.com