What an order is

An order is a request for a dataset, built to a written specification.

Four things make up an order, and all four are agreed before any work starts:

• The specification. What the data is about, what shape it takes, and what you are going to do with it. This is a conversation, not a form.
• The quota. How many delivered tasks the order buys. A task is one unit of the dataset — one problem, one environment, one labelled example, depending on what you ordered. The quota is a count of tasks that satisfy the quality contract. Work that does not satisfy it is not delivered and is not counted against your quota.
• The quality contract. The written promises the delivered data has to keep. See the quality contract.
• The price. One number, in US dollars, agreed before you commit. It does not move afterwards unless you change the order and agree a new quote.

How to place an order

1. Tell us what you need. Start a draft in the user portal, or talk to your Andromede contact. A draft is private, costs nothing, and can be edited or abandoned freely.
2. We send a quote. The quote fixes the four things above: specification, quota, quality contract, price. It also carries an expected delivery date.
3. You accept the quote. Accepting is the commitment — it is the point at which the order becomes billable, and it is the only action in the flow that spends money. Nothing before it does.
4. We build it. The order moves to in progress and you can follow it. See what an order's status means.
5. You get the data. See getting your data.

Ordering through the API

You can also place an order with an API key, if the key carries the orders:write scope and an Andromede administrator has granted it a budget. This is the same commitment as pressing accept in the user portal, so the scope is deliberately separate from read access and deliberately hard to grant by accident. See API keys.

What you are charged

You see one figure: the price of the order, agreed at the quote. Your invoice is built from accepted orders, and an order that is never accepted is never invoiced.

You can cancel from the order page while production has not started. Cancelling is permanent. What is owed on a cancelled order depends on how far it got and is settled with your Andromede contact rather than automatically.