Terms of service

Description of our service and of some technical terms

• We offer our customers to submit requests to our digital service that will render the specified URL and, depending on the request parameters, respond with a screenshot, the browser-rendered HTML markup and the raw data as received over the network. Common use cases of such services are quality assurance testing, competitor price monitoring, the generation of preview images and text summaries for search engines and social media, and market research.
• Scraped data in general is the data extracted from the response of automated requests to websites. In the specific context here, scraped data means the response of our scraping API. A scraped resource, URL or website is the online resource from which the data is extracted.
• When we speak of requests without further attributes, we mean network requests to our scraping and screenshot API made via the HTTPS protocol. Demo requests are requests that can be made by any visitor of our website without logging in. Free requests are requests that are free of charge and can be made by logged in users for testing purposes. Successful or failed requests are requests where the scraped resource has or has not, respectively, provided a successful response. Server-side request are network requests created by our server to external online resources.

Payment conditions

• By making payments to us, you acquire the right to make a corresponding number of requests to our digital service. In more detail, to be able to make more requests after having used up the provided amount of free requests, you need to add funds to your account balance by making a prepayment in the payments section. Each further request then results in the reduction of the account balance by the cost of the specific request.
• The prices for different types of requests are displayed on the homepage of this website. Possible price increases will be announced via e-mail before they become effective. If you do not agree to the price increase, you must stop making further prepayments, in addition we will provide you with free requests upon inquiry so that you can consume your account balance at the previous price conditions.
• You agree that you are not entitled to refunds for prepayments made to us. We cannot offer unconditional refunds for legal reasons.

Exclusion of warranty

• Except for your right to make requests, we disclaim all warranties of any kind, including the absense of service interruptions, the correctness of the scraped data, the absence of harmful content in the scraped data, the fitness for a particular purpose, and that the requests will be successful.
• The provision of demo requests is not part of our contractual obligation and only serves to demonstrate the capabilities of our service. We may disable the possibility to make demo requests at our discretion. For demo requests we may obfuscate the response by falsifying the numerical data they contain, or by adding watermarks.

Abuse prevention

• You are only allowed to scrape publicly available data. You are responsible to obey the applicable legal requirements for your usage of the scraped data. Part of the legal requirements are for example the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the copyright law, the fair competition law, and the database right. We reject any liability for third-party claims arising from the usage of the scraped data by our customers.
• We reserve the right to implement content blocking, which means to block access to specific scraped URLs and websites or to block requests or responses based on their content, at our discretion to prevent abuse, to prevent damage to third-party systems, or to comply with legal requirements.
• You agree to provide feedback in case we ask for clarification about your usage of our service. Failure to provide feedback in a timely manner may result in the deactivation of the possibility to make requests.
• You agree to limit your request rate to a setting that is acceptable for your purpose. Limiting the request rate per scraped website and in total helps prevent overloading the scraped website and our service, respectively.
• We technically implement limits to the request rate on a per-website basis to prevent the overloading of the scraped websites. Requests may be rejected if you attempt to use a too high request rate or if other users are creating lots of requests to the same scraped resource at the same time.
• While other providers of similar services do not charge failed requests at all, for failed requests that potentially have created server-side requests we do charge a small amount of money to make it economically unattractive to abuse our service with excessive numbers of requests.
• Demo requests have a rate limitation per client IP address. We may disable the possibility to make demo requests at our discretion.
• You may use the POST request method only to retrieve data and not to modify resources on the scraped website. We do not support contact form spam, automated user account creation, and click fraud. You agree that we may inspect request bodies using manual or automated means to detect and block illegitimate usage of our service.