Acceptable Use Policy

This Policy forms part of the Terms of Service and applies to every Contractor and every user they add. Breaching it is grounds for suspension or termination under Section 11 of the Terms.

1. Pricing and honesty

The estimator exists to give a homeowner an honest indication of what a job costs. You must not:

• publish a price sheet you do not intend to honour in the way a reasonable homeowner would read it, including a deliberately low range designed to capture a lead you will then reprice;
• describe the output as a quotation, an offer, or a fixed price, or remove or obscure the wording that says it is a range;
• misstate your trading name, licensing, insurance, certifications, or service area;
• use the estimator to advertise a trade you are not qualified or licensed to perform where a licence is required;
• switch on the optional financing line ("or from ~$X/mo") unless the APR and term you enter are ones a lender actually offers your customers. That line is your advertisement of credit terms, not ours, and the rules on advertising credit (in the US, Regulation Z, 12 CFR §1026.24; in France, Code de la consommation art. L312-5 et seq.) apply to you. See the Disclaimers, Section 2.

2. The people who use your estimator

You must not:

• use the Service to collect personal data from people who have not been shown what it is for, or to collect it under a pretext;
• collect health data, financial-account or card details, government identifiers, biometric data, or data about children. The Service is not designed for any of them, and nothing in it is built to protect them;
• add a homeowner to a marketing list on the strength of an estimate request. The consent they gave is to be contacted about that project, and nothing more;
• contact a homeowner in a way that breaks the rules that apply to you, including the US TCPA and state equivalents, CAN-SPAM, and French and EU rules on unsolicited commercial contact;
• upload, or encourage a homeowner to upload, photographs containing other identifiable people, documents, or anything sensitive.

3. The Service itself

You must not:

• attempt to access another Contractor's account, data, or estimator configuration;
• probe, scan, or test the security of the Service except with our prior written permission, or circumvent rate limits, bot verification, form tokens, or any other control;
• scrape the Service, or automate submissions to any estimator, including your own;
• use the Service to send bulk, unsolicited, or automated messages, or to relay mail to addresses that did not request it;
• point a webhook at an address you do not control, or use the webhook facility to reach a network you are not entitled to reach;
• resell, sublicense, white-label, or provide the Service to a third party as your own without our written agreement;
• copy, decompile, or reverse-engineer the Service, or remove attribution where it is required by your plan;
• upload malware, or content that is unlawful, defamatory, harassing, obscene, or that infringes anyone's rights;
• open more than one account, or an account in another name, to get around a suspension, a limit, or a termination;
• use any content of ours, or of any Homeowner, to train a machine-learning model, or to build a competing service;
• (when billing launches) pay with a card or account you are not authorised to use, or file a chargeback for a charge you knew was valid instead of asking us for a refund under the Refund Policy;
• use the Service if you, your business, or its owners are subject to sanctions administered by the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, the EU, or the UK, or from a country under comprehensive US sanctions (Terms, Section 18).

3A. Prohibited content

The only content Contractors and Homeowners can place on the Service is a business name and logo, price-sheet text and question wording, notes on a lead, and up to three job photographs per lead. None of it may be or contain:

• child sexual abuse material, of any kind, in any form. We report apparent material to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children as US federal law requires (18 U.S.C. §2258A), preserve it for law enforcement, and terminate the account. See the Copyright and User Content Policy, Section 6;
• material that infringes a copyright, trademark, or other right (a competitor's logo, a stock photo you have no licence for, another business's price list);
• personal data of anyone who has not been told and has not agreed, including photographs of identifiable people other than the person uploading, documents, licence plates, or the inside of someone else's home;
• content that is defamatory, threatening, harassing, hateful, or that promotes violence or illegal activity;
• anything that facilitates sex trafficking or prostitution (the FOSTA-SESTA carve-out to US immunity, 47 U.S.C. §230(e)(5), applies regardless of any other rule here);
• executable code, scripts, or anything that attempts to run in another user's browser.

We do not pre-screen content, but we may remove any content that breaches this Policy, and where the law requires it we will.

4. Fair use

The Service is priced for normal business use. Sustained traffic far beyond what your business plausibly generates, whether from testing, load generation, or a third party embedding your estimator without your knowledge, may be rate-limited or suspended. We will contact you before acting where the situation allows.

5. Reporting and enforcement

Reporting. Report abuse, illegal content, or an infringement to sebastien@beyondtheedgestudio.com. Say what the content is, where it is (the Contractor's business name or the estimator address), and why it breaks this Policy or the law. Copyright complaints follow the notice procedure in the Copyright and User Content Policy. Reports about content that is illegal in the EU are handled as described in the Platform Rules, and the person who made the report and the person whose content is affected are both told what we decided and why.

What we may do, in escalating order and depending on the seriousness: tell you and ask you to put it right within a set time; remove or disable the specific content or feature; suspend an estimator or an account; terminate the account under Section 11 of the Terms; and report the matter to law enforcement or a regulator where we are legally required to, or where there is a risk to a person. We may act immediately and without notice where there is a risk to homeowners, to another Contractor, or to the Service, where the content is child sexual abuse material, or where the law requires it; otherwise we tell you first and give you an opportunity to respond. We use our reasonable judgment, we act consistently, and we may take into account how many times the same problem has recurred.

What is never a breach. Leaving an honest review or rating of EdgeQuote anywhere, complaining about us to a regulator, or reporting a security problem to us in good faith. We never suspend or penalise an account for any of these (US Consumer Review Fairness Act, 15 U.S.C. §45b).

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NOTES FOR YOUR LAWYER

1. Section 1 is the unusual one. Most acceptable-use policies police technical abuse; this one also polices pricing honesty, because a deliberately misleading price range is the most likely way this product causes real harm to a consumer, and because a regulator looking at a misleading estimate will look at us as well as at the contractor. Confirm the drafting is enforceable and does not create a duty to monitor that we cannot meet.
2. The financing rule puts Regulation Z and the French credit-advertising rules on the Contractor, which is where they sit, but the product supplies the fixed disclaimer text. Confirm that supplying the disclaimer does not make us a joint advertiser. The Disclaimers document, note 3, has the full analysis.
3. "No marketing list" (Section 2) limits what a contractor may do with a lead they paid for. Confirm it is enforceable and commercially acceptable, because contractors will push on it.
4. We do not pre-screen content or price sheets (Sections 3A and 5). Nothing here should be read as a representation that we do; the wording "we may remove" preserves the US §230(c)(2) "Good Samaritan" position and the EU hosting exemption (DSA Art. 6), both of which depend on not being treated as the author. Confirm no monitoring obligation is implied.
5. Suspension without notice (Section 5) is limited to listed risk situations, and EU users receive a statement of reasons under DSA Art. 17 via the Platform Rules. Check the clause against unfair-terms rules in France and the EU, and against Directive 93/13 Annex 1(g) (termination without reasonable notice).
6. The chargeback-abuse rule makes a knowingly false chargeback a breach. It is not intended to deter legitimate disputes; confirm the wording cannot be read that way, since card-network rules and some state laws protect the right to dispute.
7. Consumer Review Fairness Act. The "never a breach" paragraph is there so that no term anywhere in the set can be read as restricting reviews, which the CRFA voids and the FTC enforces. Keep it.

WHAT THIS DOES NOT COVER

• Trade licensing, bonding, and insurance requirements, which vary by jurisdiction and are the Contractor's responsibility.
• Consumer-protection rules on how prices are advertised in the Contractor's own market.
• Anything a Contractor does outside the Service.