Terms of service

Draft, not reviewed by counsel. Written by an agent from docs/ARCHITECTURE.md §3 and §10, so every limit and prohibition below matches what the code enforces. It is not legal advice and it has not been read by a lawyer. Take it to one before it is published. Notes addressed to that lawyer are marked [For counsel].

Version: draft 1 · Written: 13 September 2026 · Counsel review: pending · Published at: https://honestfetch.dev/terms, 13 September 2026 · In force from: 13 September 2026, for anyone issued a key from that date

1. Who these terms are between

You, the customer, and HallinCreations, in Sweden, who operates HonestFetch. That is the same operator the bot page names and the same one the Cloudflare Verified listing names.

[For counsel] The legal form is undecided (docs/adr/0006-business-setup.md). The name and organisation number belong here once it is.

2. What the service does

You send a URL and an optional question. HonestFetch fetches that one page, applies the site's own rules, and returns a short extract of the text with the source named.

3. The beta

The beta is free. Nothing is charged and no invoice is issued.

It will not stay free. Usage is metered from the first day precisely so that a price can be set from real numbers. When a price is set, you are told before it applies, and you choose whether to continue.

No service level is promised during the beta. The service may be unavailable, may change, and may end.

4. What you must not do

These are the conditions of use. Breaking any of them is grounds for §7.

  1. Do not store or republish the content HonestFetch returns, beyond the immediate use your agent makes of it. HonestFetch declares a content use of immediate to every site it reads: the text answers one question now and is not stored, indexed, or reused. That declaration is made on your behalf as well as ours, and it has to be true.
  2. Do not use HonestFetch to get around a site's rules. Not through it, and not around it. If a page is refused because of robots.txt, Content Signals, a licence, a login, a paywall, or a metering wall, that is the answer.
  3. Do not send HonestFetch at a site in order to burden it. The politeness limits in §6 exist to protect sites, not to be worked around with more keys or more accounts.
  4. Do not share your API key, and do not let somebody else's traffic run under it. The record of who asked for what is the thing that lets a complaint be answered with facts.
  5. Do not use HonestFetch to collect personal data at scale, or to build a profile of a person from pages about them.

5. What HonestFetch will never do, whatever you ask

These are not settings. Nothing in the service can be configured to do any of them.

A refusal is an answer, not a failure. When a page is blocked or paid, you get a link to hand to a person, not the content behind it. You are not charged for content you did not receive.

6. Limits

Limit Value
Reads per minute, per customer 60
Reads per minute, per customer per host 10
Reads at once, per customer 5
Reads per month Your plan's; unlimited during the beta

HonestFetch also limits itself per destination site, for every customer at once: at most two requests at a time and at least a second between them, or longer when a site's Crawl-delay asks for it. A Retry-After from a site is honoured exactly, for everybody, not only for whoever triggered it.

Past a limit you get a refusal that says how long to wait. A refused request costs a slot in the rate window and never costs quota.

7. Suspension, and the kill switch

HonestFetch may disable a key, or a whole account, at any time and without notice, when a site complains or when traffic looks abusive. This is deliberate, and it is quick on purpose: the alternative is that every customer loses access because of one.

8. Your data

docs/legal/PRIVACY.md is the full statement. In short: pages are never stored; the URL you send is never written down in full; usage records keep 30 days of detail and 13 months of daily totals; everything is hosted in the European Union, on one machine in Helsinki, Finland.

A data processing agreement is available to business customers on request.

9. Your content, and ours

You keep whatever rights you have in the URLs and questions you send.

HonestFetch claims no rights in the text it returns. It is somebody else's page, and the answer names the source. Whether you may use that text is between you and the site, and §4.1 and §4.2 are what HonestFetch asks of you about it.

10. Warranties

The service is provided as it is. During the free beta there is no warranty of availability, accuracy, or fitness for a purpose.

HonestFetch does not warrant that a site permits you to use its content. It reports what a site's rules say and refuses what they forbid. It does not give you a licence the site did not grant.

11. Liability

[For counsel] A draft, written so that there is something to mark up rather than a blank. The figure in 11.2 is provisional until ADR-0002 sets a price. legal.test.ts fails the build on the day that ADR is accepted, so this clause cannot be forgotten.

11.1 Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law: for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for intent or gross negligence (uppsåt eller grov vårdslöshet).

11.2 The cap. Subject to 11.1, HonestFetch's total liability under or in connection with these terms, in any twelve-month period, is limited to the greater of the fees you paid for the service in that period and EUR 100. During the free beta the fees are zero, so the cap is EUR 100.

11.3 Excluded losses. Subject to 11.1, HonestFetch is not liable for loss of profit, loss of business, loss of data except to the extent it results from a breach of the data processing agreement, or any indirect or consequential loss.

11.4 What you send is yours to answer for. You are responsible for the URLs and questions you send, and for what your agent does with what comes back. HonestFetch is not liable for a claim by a site owner that arises from your use in breach of §4.

11.5 A refusal is not a breach. A page refused under §5 or §7 is the service working as described, and no liability arises from it.

12. Term, and ending it

12.1 These terms apply from the moment you first use the service and continue until ended under this section.

12.2 During the beta, either of us may end the arrangement at any time with immediate effect. You do so by revoking your keys. HonestFetch does so by notice to the address on your account, or under §7.

12.3 After the beta, either of us may end with thirty days' notice. HonestFetch may still act at once under §7.

12.4 On ending: your keys stop working; what HonestFetch holds about your account follows the retention periods in PRIVACY.md §7; and §§4.1, 4.2, 9, 10, 11 and 13 survive, because a prohibition on republishing content is meaningless if it ends when the account does.

[For counsel] The notice period in 12.3 is provisional until ADR-0002 sets a billing period; a monthly plan and a thirty-day notice belong together.

13. Governing law and venue

13.1 These terms are governed by Swedish law, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.

13.2 Any dispute is settled by the Swedish courts, with Stockholms tingsrätt as the court of first instance.

13.3 If you are a consumer, nothing in this section removes the protection of mandatory law where you live. The service is offered to businesses (ADR-0006), and this clause exists for the case where that is not how it was used.

[For counsel] 13.2 is the default. Arbitration under the SCC rules is the usual alternative for business contracts in Sweden, and the choice depends on the expected size of a dispute, which depends on the price.

14. Changes

A change to these terms changes the version and the date at the top. You are told before a material change applies to you.