Acceptable Use Policy

01Scope

This policy forms part of the Terms of Service and applies to everyone using PixyScan. It exists because our product sends automated traffic to other people's servers, and that is a capability worth setting rules around.

02Only scan what you control

You may add a site only if you own it or are authorised by its owner to audit it. Adding a site is a confirmation that you have that authority.

Scanning a third party's website without permission may be unlawful where you or they are located. That is your responsibility, not ours.

03What the crawler does on your behalf

So you know what you are authorising: by default the crawler identifies itself as pixyscan-bot and respects robots.txt. It honours the crawl rules and exclusion patterns you set and stays within the page budget you set. If a server asks for a slower pace, you can turn on rate-limit healing, which fetches one page at a time with a pause between requests.

It does not sign in, submit forms or bypass authentication. It only fetches pages behind a login when you give it HTTP Basic Auth details or custom headers for your own site. If you change the user agent or switch robots.txt off, you must only do so for a site you control.

From the Hobby tier up, PixyScan also checks whether the external links and images on your pages still work, by sending a single lightweight request to each address. Those requests go to the third-party sites your pages link to, are made separately from the crawl, and may not carry the pixyscan-bot name.

04Prohibited uses

You must not use PixyScan to:

• Attack, overload, degrade or disrupt any system - yours or anyone else's. Scanning is not a load test and must not be used as one.
• Circumvent authentication, paywalls, rate limits or access controls on any site.
• Harvest personal data, email addresses or content for scraping, resale or redistribution.
• Probe for vulnerabilities in systems you are not authorised to test.
• Resell, sublicense or provide the service to third parties without a written agreement with us.
• Break any law that applies to you, or infringe anyone's intellectual property.
• Share account credentials, or evade subscription limits by creating multiple accounts.

05Reporting abuse

If you believe PixyScan is being used against a site you own, email support@pixyscan.com with the domain and the approximate times. Our crawler identifies itself as pixyscan-bot by default, so its requests will usually be identifiable in your logs. We will investigate and stop it.

06Enforcement

We may suspend or terminate an account that breaches this policy, and we may do so without notice where a breach is causing harm. Where it is reasonable to do so we will tell you first and give you a chance to put it right. No refund is due for a period terminated for breach.