Your DataSteak account

Buying a dataset gives you a file. The account is what happens around that: where your purchases live, who else can reach them, and how you pull the same data again next month without asking anyone.

This page describes what is there now. There is a short section at the end naming what is not, because a tour that quietly skips the empty rooms is not much use.

Three levels of access, and the reason for them

An account has one Owner and can have Admins and Members.

• A Member sees Personal and Work: search, the datasets this account owns, favourites and alerts. They can find data and pull it.
• An Admin additionally sees the Business Account group: purchases, API keys, members.
• The Owner additionally sees Billing.

The point of the split is that a Member can do the work without being shown the money. Purchase history, prices and order references belong to whoever pays, and most people who need a dataset are not that person.

Hiding a nav row is presentation, not security. A Member who types the URL of a business page is sent back to their home page. The check happens on the server, not in the menu.

Personal is personal

Two things in your account are yours rather than the account's.

Favourites are per user. You star a dataset, it appears on your Favourites page, and your colleague's list is unaffected. It is a shortlist, not a shared collection.

Alerts are the same. You choose which datasets you want to hear about when they are republished.

Everything else, purchases included, belongs to the account. Buying a dataset twice does not give you two of it.

Finding data

Search looks across the whole catalogue, not only what you own. It is the same search the public marketplace runs, and it is deliberately not a paid feature, because charging inside the account for something a signed-out visitor already has would be strange.

Results carry the doneness level, the record count, the source and the refresh date, and every row has a View link through to the full product page. What you already own is marked with an Owned pill, and there is a toggle for Everything against Only what I own.

The two pages about what you own, and why they are different

This catches people out, so it is worth being explicit.

Datasets, under Work, is what this account owns. One row per product. No prices, no order references, no receipts. It is reachable by Members, because a Member who can find a dataset and watch it but never download it is not much of a Member.

Purchase history, under Business Account, is the money. One row per order, with the reference, the amount, the VAT and the invoice. Owner and Admin only.

So buying the same dataset twice is two rows in Purchase history and one row in Datasets. That is the distinction: one page is about what you have, the other is about what you paid.

Keys and access are two separate things

An API key identifies who is calling. You create it yourself under Business Account, API Keys, and it is shown once at the moment of creation. Only a hash is stored, so nobody can show it to you again, including us. Lose it and you revoke it and make another.

Access is which datasets that key can reach, and it is arranged per dataset against the account. The two are deliberately separate: rotating a key must not change what you are entitled to, and paying for another dataset must not force you to re-issue credentials to everything that uses the old key.

A valid key that reaches nothing is a normal state. It means the key works and no dataset has been turned on for it yet. The dashboard says so rather than leaving you to discover it as a 403.

Settings, and who the invoice is for

Account settings hangs off the account block at the foot of the sidebar rather than sitting in the nav, because that is where people look for it.

It is laid out in two columns on purpose. The left is the person: your details and your preferences, including the light and dark theme, which is stored on the device rather than the account, so your choice does not follow you onto a colleague's screen. The right is the business: company details and the address they sit above, because who the invoice is made out to and where it goes are one thought rather than two.

Billing is Owner only and holds the plan, the payment method and the invoices for the whole account. One-off dataset purchases carry no recurring charge.

Support

Contact Support sits in its own group at the foot of the nav, outside the Business Account group, and it is open to everyone including Members. Somebody with a problem should not need permission to say so.

Raise a ticket there, pick a category, and your existing tickets are listed below the form.

What is not built yet

Named rather than hidden, because they are visible in the nav and you will wonder.

• Data Explorer is marked Soon. The page shows a fixed fifteen-row preview of one dataset so the shape of the feature is visible. Nothing on it is interactive.
• AI Assistant is marked Soon.
• Automation describes two routes, a scheduled email delivery and a developer route. Neither runs yet.
• Tokens is marked Soon. The intention is prepaid credit for the parts of DataSteak that do work on your behalf, with one balance and one invoice instead of three subscriptions. Datasets are bought outright and would never draw on it.
• Subscriptions is empty for everyone today. Recurring API access will appear there when it exists. One-off purchases show under Purchase history instead.

APIs, under Work, is real and lists the endpoints your account can call. If it looks empty, that is because API access is arranged per dataset on request rather than bought from the site. Ask us and we will turn it on, then it appears there.

If you want the detail of calling it, that is on Using the DataSteak API. What a file looks like when it arrives is on Data standards.