Acceptable Use Policy

Effective 2026-05-16. Last updated 2026-05-16.

ScrapeNest is built to help developers retrieve, parse, and reason about public web data. This policy describes what you can use the API for, and the narrow set of things you can't. It applies to everyone using the Service.

1. Scope and the spirit of this policy

This Acceptable Use Policy (the "AUP") supplements our Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy. Capitalized terms not defined here have the meanings given in the Terms.

The Service is a tool. A tool that retrieves public web pages, runs structured-data extraction, summarizes documents, and transcribes audio is genuinely useful for an enormous number of legitimate purposes — and a small number of harmful ones. This AUP is our attempt to draw the line clearly enough that builders know where they stand.

If you are not sure whether your use case is allowed, email [email protected] before you build on top of the Service. We would rather have a five-minute conversation up front than terminate your account later.

2. What the API is for

Examples of uses we explicitly support and want to see more of:

  • Building AI agents, copilots, and retrieval-augmented generation pipelines that cite their sources.
  • Competitive intelligence on publicly visible product pages, pricing, reviews, and SERP rankings.
  • Brand, reputation, and review monitoring across the web.
  • Market research, trend analysis, and academic research on publicly available content.
  • Lead enrichment from publicly listed business contact details (with downstream compliance with anti-spam laws).
  • Content aggregation for newsletters, dashboards, and read-later apps, with attribution to the source.
  • Archival, link-rot mitigation, and digital-preservation work.
  • Transcription of podcasts, interviews, lectures, and public talks for accessibility or summarization.
  • Internal automations that gather data your business has a legitimate interest in.

We are a tool for builders. We expect customers to take responsibility for the things they build.

3. Prohibited uses

You may not use the Service, and you may not allow anyone using your account or API keys to use the Service, to:

3.1 Break the law

  • Violate any applicable law, regulation, court order, or third-party right.
  • Conduct or facilitate any activity that would be unlawful in the jurisdiction where it is carried out or where its effect is felt.
  • Use the Service for fraud, money laundering, tax evasion, or to evade economic sanctions.

3.2 Harm people

  • Build, host, or distribute content sexually exploitative of minors. Any account associated with this activity is terminated and reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and applicable authorities.
  • Stalk, harass, surveil, dox, threaten, intimidate, or facilitate violence against any person or group.
  • Build profiles of identifiable individuals for surveillance, dragnet collection, social scoring, or political targeting at scale.
  • Discriminate or facilitate discrimination on the basis of legally protected classes.
  • Produce, distribute, or amplify non-consensual intimate imagery, including synthetic media of real people.
  • Run campaigns intended to deceive voters about an election, ballot measure, or public-health intervention.

3.3 Misuse personal data

  • Harvest personal contact information (email, phone, address, social-media handle, employer) at scale for the purpose of unsolicited messaging, telemarketing, or sale to a third party.
  • Build a "people search" or person-lookup product that aggregates personal information about individuals without a clear lawful basis.
  • Collect personal information of children under 13 (or under 16 in jurisdictions where that is the legal threshold).
  • Collect, store, or process protected categories of data (health, financial, government identifiers, biometric, genetic, precise location) where doing so would require regulatory permissions you do not have. ScrapeNest is not configured as a HIPAA business associate, a PCI processor beyond the scope of what Stripe handles directly, or a GLBA-covered financial-information service.

3.4 Bypass security or access controls

  • Use the Service to attack a target site — for example, credential stuffing, brute-force login attempts, vulnerability scanning, or DDoS amplification.
  • Use the Service to defeat encryption, DRM, or technical-protection measures.
  • Use the Service to access systems, networks, or accounts that you do not have permission to access. The Service may solve bot-detection and rate-limit challenges on public web pages — that is part of the product — but it is not a tool for unauthorized access to private systems.
  • Use the Service to bypass paywalls, login walls, or geo-restrictions in ways that violate the rights of the operator of the gated content.

3.5 Infringe rights

  • Use outputs from the Service to republish copyrighted content in a way that exceeds the bounds of fair use, fair dealing, or another applicable exception, particularly at scale.
  • Mass-mirror or redistribute paid or subscription-gated content (news articles, academic papers, paywalled databases, premium audio or video, audiobooks).
  • Use the Service to remove copyright, trademark, or attribution notices from retrieved content.
  • Infringe trade secrets, contractual confidentiality obligations, or proprietary information that you are not authorized to access.

3.6 Generate or amplify harm

  • Generate phishing pages, scam infrastructure, fake-review networks, or content designed to deceive automated detection systems.
  • Produce malware, exploits, or instructions for inflicting physical or digital harm.
  • Plagiarize academic, journalistic, or creative work without attribution.
  • Distribute deceptive synthetic media in a way that violates law or causes foreseeable harm.

3.7 Resell or compete unfairly

  • Resell raw API access in a way that effectively repackages ScrapeNest as a competing scraping API. (Building products and SDKs on top of the Service is encouraged; reselling thin pass-through proxies of our endpoints is not.)
  • Use the Service to reverse-engineer, scrape, or systematically copy ScrapeNest's own documentation, dashboard, or marketing site for the purpose of cloning it.
  • Use the Service in a way that is intended to harm the operations or reputation of ScrapeNest itself.

4. Use of authenticated sessions and cookies

Some endpoints (for example, the audio-transcript endpoint) accept an optional cookies field that lets the Service act on a target site as a logged-in user. You may use this feature only with cookies that come from accounts that you own or that you are explicitly authorized to use.

You may not submit cookies for accounts you do not control, cookies obtained without authorization, cookies belonging to other people, or cookies obtained by phishing or credential theft. The Service's protection for cookies — single-use temporary file, deletion before response, redaction from persistent records — is for your benefit when you supply your own cookies, not a license to misuse someone else's session.

5. Your responsibility for target sites

The Service helps you retrieve content from third-party websites and platforms. We do not have a relationship with the operators of those sites and we cannot tell you, in any specific case, whether retrieving their content is permitted under their terms of service, applicable copyright law, or computer-misuse law.

You agree that:

  • You have a legitimate reason to retrieve the content you request, and you have determined that your use of the output is lawful in your jurisdiction and in the jurisdiction of the target site to the extent it is reasonably knowable.
  • You are solely responsible for complying with any target site's terms, including any robots-style preferences expressed by the site operator, where compliance is legally required of you.
  • Where compliance with target-site terms is not legally required of you (for example, when the terms are not contractually binding because there is no clickwrap, and the content is public), you accept that the operator may still attempt to block access or take other measures, and that the Service does not promise to defeat those measures.
  • You will not represent to a target site that you are the operator of the Service, or that your scraping activity is sanctioned by ScrapeNest as a publisher of the data. The Service is a tool; you are the operator of your scraping activity.

6. Platform abuse

You may not:

  • Create multiple accounts to evade free-tier limits, rate limits, suspensions, or other usage controls.
  • Use the Service to attack, probe, scan, or stress-test ScrapeNest itself or any third party without authorization, including by maliciously triggering our outbound proxy fleet.
  • Submit traffic that is intended to consume credits without producing useful work for you (for example, junk requests designed to inflate our costs or test our economics).
  • Share account credentials or API keys with anyone outside your organization. API keys are for machine use; collaboration happens in the dashboard's team features.
  • Attempt to reverse-engineer, decompile, or extract the source code of the Service except to the extent expressly permitted by law and only to the minimum extent necessary.
  • Probe the Service's security without coordinating with us in advance via [email protected].

7. Sanctions and export controls

You may not access or use the Service from, or on behalf of any person resident in or organized under the laws of, any country or region subject to comprehensive U.S. economic sanctions (currently including Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and the Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk regions of Ukraine), and you may not be on any U.S. government list of prohibited or restricted parties (including the Specially Designated Nationals list, the Entity List, the Denied Persons List, or the Debarred List).

You may not use the Service in any way that would result in a violation of U.S. export-control laws, including by providing access to the Service to a person who is subject to those laws.

If sanctions designations change while you are a customer, your continued use must remain compliant; if it cannot, we may suspend or terminate the account.

9. Reporting violations

If you believe a customer of the Service is violating this AUP — for example, scraping content in a way that materially harms your site or your users — send a report with concrete evidence to [email protected]. We will investigate in good faith and take proportionate action. We cannot share the identity of a customer except as required by valid legal process.

If you operate a website and want to discuss target-site concerns proactively, the same address is the right place to start.

10. Enforcement

When we believe a customer has violated this AUP, our typical response is the least disruptive measure that addresses the issue:

  1. A warning by email, with the chance to fix the activity or explain what is going on.
  2. Throttling or temporary suspension of the offending endpoints or the account.
  3. Termination of the account, deletion of associated API keys, and forfeiture of unused credits.

For severe violations — including child sexual abuse material, attacks against third parties, fraud, or sanctions evasion — we will skip directly to termination and, where required, report to law enforcement. We will not provide notice before suspension when notice would impede a security or legal response.

We do not commit to investigate every customer-to-customer complaint, and our decisions are at our reasonable discretion. Nothing in this AUP creates a contractual right for any third party to enforce this Policy against a ScrapeNest customer.

11. Changes

We update this AUP as we learn what abuse looks like in practice. Material changes will be announced to active customers and posted with a new "Effective" date. Continued use of the Service after the change becomes effective is acceptance of the change.