You do not have to agree to anything to use the free checker. The paid tier is $35 a year and comes with a 30-day refund. This page is the whole agreement between you and the company that runs CiteStamp, and it is written to be read, not survived.
Last updated: 2026-07-09
CiteStamp is operated by 3Rivers Enterprises LLC, an Indiana limited liability company doing business as CiteStamp, in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Anything you buy is billed by that company. ICSAC shares a founder with CiteStamp and nothing else — it is not the operator and never the biller. Reach a human at info@citestamp.com.
The citation-health checker at /check is free. No account, no signup, no card, no cap on how many references you run — now and as a standing commitment. It runs in your browser: it reads the bibliography you paste and looks each reference up one identifier at a time, asking whether the reference resolves, whether its title matches the DOI it claims, and whether the work is marked retracted. Asking the public graph is free and anonymous, and signing your own work under your ORCID iD is free. None of that needs this agreement.
There is exactly one paid tier: CiteStamp Pro, US$35 per year, billed through Stripe Checkout. There is no free trial. It is a subscription that renews. Stripe keeps your card on file and charges it US$35 again a year later, and every year after that, until you cancel. You cancel it yourself in the Stripe billing portal, reachable from your account; cancelling stops the next renewal. Pro is the paid subscription described on the pricing page — that page is the live list of what it includes, and it never names a feature before the feature exists. Prices are stated without tax. We do not collect or remit sales tax for you, so any tax your jurisdiction imposes on the purchase is yours to handle.
For 30 days after each annual charge you can have all of it back, no questions asked — email info@citestamp.com and we refund the charge. You can cancel any time in the billing portal. Cancel inside the 30 days and take the refund; cancel after, and Pro simply runs to the end of the year you already paid for and then does not renew — once the 30-day window has passed we do not prorate or refund the unused part.
The graph API is rate-limited by who is asking. Anonymous requests run at 10 a minute per IP address. A free key, issued by email, raises that to 60 a minute. A Pro token raises it to 600 a minute. Those are the limits as built; if you need more, the conversation starts at info@citestamp.com.
You keep every right in your own manuscripts and reference lists — running them through the checker signs nothing over to us, and, as the privacy page spells out, CiteStamp never receives your reference list. The signed op-log is dedicated to the public domain under CC0. You are never paying for the citation data, and you never need our permission to use it.
What crosses the wire is spelled out on the privacy page, and this agreement does not repeat it. The one line worth putting here: when you use the checker, titles and DOIs go straight from your browser to Crossref, DataCite, and OpenAlex and to CiteStamp’s public graph endpoint — CiteStamp never receives your reference list itself.
CiteStamp is provided as is. There is no uptime guarantee and no service-level promise — it is a small, independent service, and sometimes small independent services are down. To the extent the law allows, the most 3Rivers Enterprises LLC can owe you for anything connected to the service is the total of the fees you paid us in the 12 months before the claim. If you paid us nothing, that figure is zero.
This agreement is governed by the laws of the State of Indiana. Any dispute that has to reach a court goes to the state or federal courts sitting in Allen County, Indiana, and both you and we agree to that venue.
We run an append-only log for a living and are not going to quietly rewrite the deal. When a change matters it appears here with a new date at the top. Using the service after a change means you accept the version on this page.
Questions about any of this: info@citestamp.com. A human reads it.