Frequently asked questions

Q: How frequently does your company update the ZIP Code databases, and how much do updates cost?

A: Our ZIP Code databases are updated approximately every 6 months.  We will notify past customers by email when an update is made available.  As far as the cost for such updates, the price varies depending on the license arrangement and the contents of the database.  The update prices are, however, typically lower than the original purchase price.

Q: It appears that you have not updated your database files for 4 months.  Doesn't that make your data stale?  Why should I purchase a 4 month old database from you?

A: On a typical month only a dozen or two ZIP Codes change (new ZIP Codes added, old ZIP Codes deleted).  Considering that a typical database contains 43,000 ZIP Code records, this means that the percentage of "stale" data amounts to 0.0005% of the entire database.

Also, we provide FREE updates to customers who purchase a database within 8 weeks of a new release.  So if you were to purchase a database on May 14th and we subsequently released an update on July 1, you will be offered the update at no cost.

Q: Why do you not provide Excel XLS files for your expanded databases?

A: The reason why we do not make the XLS format available for any of the expanded versions is due to a limitation of Microsoft Excel. Excel cannot cannot worksheets with more than 65,536 rows or 256 columns. Since all of our expanded databases contain over 73,000 records, it would be impossible to open or import an entire expanded database into Excel. This holds true regardless of what file format you purchase, meaning that purchasing one of the alternate file formats (CSV or MDB or DBF) will not give you different results. In other words, you cannot use an expanded version of our ZIP Code databases in Excel. Excel's ceiling prevents more than 63,636 records/rows in a worksheet.

If you have any additional questions, please contact us.