Terms of use

Floodway is not a warning service

Floodway is decision support. It shows river gauge readings published by the Bureau of Meteorology and state water agencies, and it says plainly where each number came from and how old it is. It is not an official flood warning, it is not issued by any emergency service, and nobody is watching it on your behalf.

During an event, the Bureau’s warnings and the directions of your state emergency service come first, every time. If they say leave and Floodway shows a river below minor, leave.

The numbers can be wrong, late, or missing

Every reading here is measured by somebody else’s instrument and travels through somebody else’s feed. Gauges fail, are washed out, are taken offline for maintenance, and report values that are plainly impossible. Feeds stall. A gauge that has stopped reporting is marked stale rather than hidden, and a reading we cannot believe is left out rather than drawn — but neither check is perfect, and no check can invent a reading that was never taken.

The expected peak, where it is shown, is measured from how long water has actually taken between two gauges in the past. It is a median of past rises, not a forecast and not a model. A big flood runs faster than a small one and a dry channel slows the front, so treat it as the shape of the thing rather than a timetable.

Decisions are yours

Floodway is offered as it is, without warranty. We do not accept liability for decisions made using it, and to the extent the law allows, our liability is limited to refunding what you have paid us. Nothing here limits rights you have under the Australian Consumer Law, which cannot be excluded.

What is free

Every gauge, every river, every chart and the whole record stay free, on the website and in the app, and will. The free tier of alerts covers two places.

What Pro is

Pro is an auto-renewing subscription sold through the App Store, offered monthly and yearly. It lifts the alert cap to every gauge you want to watch, and adds the notifications that cost us something to produce: water on its way from upstream, the expected peak on your lock screen, and the measured travel times down your river.

The price, the period and the currency are the ones shown on the purchase screen in the app before you buy — that is Apple’s price for your store, and it is the authority, not any figure written here.

Renewal, cancelling and refunds

A subscription renews automatically at the end of each period unless it is cancelled at least 24 hours before that period ends. It is managed entirely in your Apple Account — Settings, then your name, then Subscriptions — and cancelling there stops the renewal. We cannot cancel it for you and we never see your payment details.

Payment is charged to your Apple Account at confirmation of purchase. Refunds are Apple’s to give: request one at reportaproblem.apple.com. Your Australian Consumer Law rights are unaffected.

There is no account

Pro is checked against the receipt Apple signs on your device. There is nothing to log in to, no password, and no record of who you are — which is why Restore on the purchase screen asks Apple rather than us.

The readings belong to the agencies that took them

Gauge data is published by the Bureau of Meteorology and state water agencies under their own licences, and Floodway shows the attribution for a reading wherever that reading appears. A gauge whose owner has not licensed republication is not shown at all. Those licences are theirs, not ours to pass on — if you want to reuse the underlying data, go to the agency that measured it.

Fair use of the API

The app and the website are served by the same public API, and it is not secured against you. Please do not scrape it at a rate that would spoil it for somebody standing in the rain: cache what you fetch, and identify yourself in a user agent so we can reach you before we block you.

Changes to these terms

This page is written from what the product actually does, so it changes when the product does, and the date at the top changes with it. Continuing to use Floodway after a change means accepting it. If a change matters to somebody who has paid, it will be said in the app and not only here.

Getting in touch

support@floodway.com.au reaches a person. See Support for what to include, and Privacy for what Floodway keeps and what it does not.