Data Policy & Ethics

We believe in reciprocity and transparency. Here's how we handle data.

Our Philosophy

We scrape public data responsibly. We use manufacturer APIs and respect rate limits. We aggregate product specifications that are already public to help you make better decisions.

We believe in giving back. If we use others' data, we should share ours too. That's why we're building a public API and following ethical scraping practices.

We protect what matters. Product specs are commodity data. Our real value is your builds, photos, reviews, and our community. That's what we protect.

Where Our Data Comes From

Public Manufacturer Data

• Product specifications and images from manufacturer websites
• Shopify store data via official APIs (we respect rate limits)
• Publicly available product catalogs
• We do NOT scrape private data or bypass protections

User-Generated Content

• Build photos and descriptions you upload
• Equipment lists from your builds
• Reviews and ratings (coming soon)
• Your content is YOURS - we never sell it

What We Share Back

Public Access (robots.txt)

✅ Search engines can index our product catalog
✅ Basic product/brand pages are crawlable
❌ AI training scrapers blocked (we're building an API instead)
❌ User builds/photos protected (this is YOUR content)
❌ API endpoints protected from bulk scraping

View our full policy: /robots.txt

Public API (Coming Soon)

Following the IMDb model, we're building a public API to share basic catalog data:

• Product specifications and model information
• Brand information and categories
• Basic catalog structure
• Rate-limited for fair use

What stays private: User builds, photos, and community content. This is the unique value you create, and we protect it.

Why This Matters

We could lock everything down and be hypocrites. But that's not who we are.

Instead, we're being transparent: we use public data to help the community, and we share basic data back. We protect what's actually valuable - your contributions and our curation.

This is reciprocity. This is how the web should work.

Questions?

If you're a developer wanting API access, a manufacturer wanting to update your data, or just curious about our practices:

Last updated: November 2024