Policy on Acceptable Use

1. Introduction and scope

Set out in this Acceptable Use Policy ("AUP") is what you may do, and what you may not do, with the proxy services that Budget Proxies ("we", "us", "our") supplies at budgetproxies.com. It is part of, and should be read together with, our Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Proxy Usage Policy. When you buy, access or use our datacenter, residential, mobile or residential premium proxies, you accept the rules laid out below.

Every product and feature we sell falls under this AUP, as does every byte of traffic crossing our network, along with all use of the dashboard, the APIs and the supporting tools. What we run is professional infrastructure, built for honest work. Responsibility for what you do through it remains yours, and you are required at all times to keep inside the law and inside the terms of service of whatever website or platform you reach. Should this AUP conflict with something you believe you were told elsewhere, the strictest obligation is the one that binds.

2. The people bound by this policy

Everyone who touches the service is bound by this policy, and that takes in:

• The registered account holder listed on the order and billing records.
• Employees, contractors, agents and end users, where they act on your account or by your leave.
• Anyone to whom you resell, share or sub-licence access, in cases where your agreement with us permits resale.

Making sure that everyone using your credentials or your allocation understands this AUP, and keeps to it, falls to you. Whatever happens through your account is treated as your own activity, whoever was at the keyboard.

3. Permitted uses

What follows are examples of the honest, privacy-minded jobs our customers put Budget Proxies to. Treat the list as illustration rather than an exhaustive account, and read every example as assuming you stay inside the target site’s terms of service and inside the law that applies:

• Market research — collecting openly available business data within each website’s terms.
• Ad verification — checking how your adverts appear to real users across different regions.
• SEO and price monitoring — following search rankings and competitor pricing at a sensible request rate.
• Brand protection — spotting counterfeit listings, trademark misuse and fraud.
• QA and testing — geo-accurate testing of your own apps, sites and services.
• Privacy-focused browsing — shielding your IP address and location while you work.
• Rule-abiding automation and the gathering of business data — automating honest tasks and gathering business data within each site’s terms of service and the law that applies.
• Multi-account management for agencies — running several genuine business accounts in keeping with each platform’s terms.

Unsure whether the use you have in mind is permitted? Treat it as off-limits until you have put the question to us. Sorting out a use case in advance suits us far better than handling a breach after the event.

4. Prohibited uses

Budget Proxies may not be used by you, directly or through some intermediary, for any of the purposes below, and you may not permit or assist a third party in using it for them either. Again, the list illustrates rather than exhausts:

• Activity of any kind that breaks the law in your own jurisdiction, in ours, or in the jurisdiction where the target you reach sits.
• Reaching systems, networks or accounts you have no permission to reach: hacking, brute-forcing credentials, hunting for weaknesses on targets nobody has authorised you to test.
• Fraud in any form, payment fraud, carding and identity theft among it.
• Pushing out spam or unsolicited bulk messages, or operating phishing campaigns.
• Circulating malware, ransomware, spyware or other harmful code.
• Child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and any content at all that exploits minors or endangers them.
• Harassment, stalking, threats, doxxing or any abusive behaviour towards people.
• Credential theft, account takeover, or dealing in stolen data.
• Intellectual-property theft, including piracy and copying or sharing protected works without permission.
• Attacking infrastructure, including denial-of-service activity, traffic flooding and resource exhaustion.
• Breaching the terms of service, the robots.txt file or the rate limits of any website or platform you reach.
• Circumventing, disabling or probing security, authentication or access controls that sit on systems nobody has authorised you to test.

Nothing we say assures you that our proxies will keep a platform from restricting or suspending your accounts. Using each target site inside its own rules is a matter for you.

5. Treating the sites and services you reach with respect

Using our network comes with one central condition: you handle the websites, platforms and services you reach with care. Before any activity begins, and all the way through it, you must:

• Respect the target site’s robots.txt directives and any published crawling or automation guidance.
• Read and abide by the target site’s terms of service, including any caps on automated access, account creation or data reuse.
• Keep your request rates reasonable so you never overload, slow down or disrupt a target’s infrastructure.
• Use the official API wherever one exists, and back off or stop altogether the moment a site shows signs of strain.

Our Proxy Usage Policy spells out these everyday expectations in more detail. Respecting target sites is not optional good manners; it is part of this agreement.

6. Where responsibility sits, and keeping to the law

Responsibility for what you do through our network, and for whatever comes of it, rests with you and nobody else. You confirm, in particular, that you will:

• Observe, at all times, every law and regulation bearing on you, on us, and on the targets you reach, data-protection, computer-misuse, intellectual-property, sanctions and export-control laws among them.
• Secure whatever consents, licences or authorisations your activity requires, and carry out your own duties as a data controller anywhere at all you collect or process personal data (see our Privacy Policy).
• Not treat a proxy as something that makes lawful what would be unlawful without it. Illegal without a proxy means illegal with one, and nothing about that changes.

Claims, losses and costs that arise because the service was used in breach of this policy, or of the law, are ones you agree to indemnify us against, so far as our Terms of Service allow.

7. Monitoring and enforcement

Abuse is something we watch for, and a report gets taken seriously here. Given reasonable grounds to believe this policy has been broken, we may take any of the steps set out below, with notice or without it, according to how serious the matter is:

• Ask for information or clarification about the activity in question.
• Throttle, pause or close the relevant proxies or your account.
• Hold back delivery of any remaining or future data on the account.
• Refuse a refund where closure follows a serious or repeated breach.
• Work with valid legal requests and law-enforcement investigations.

Traffic you send through our network is not logged by us. Any enforcement decision therefore rests on abuse reports, on billing records, and on the metadata the service needs in order to run, as set out in our Privacy Policy. We may act on a single serious report or on a pattern of behaviour, and choosing to act (or not) in one case does not give up our right to act in another.

8. Consequences of a violation

Consequences for breaking this policy turn on the seriousness of the breach and on the circumstances surrounding it. They may include:

• A warning, together with a request that you bring the activity back within the rules.
• Suspension without delay of the affected proxies, or of the entire account, to stop harm continuing.
• Closure of your account for serious or repeated breaches.
• Loss of any remaining data allowance, with no refund where closure follows a violation, as set out in our Refund & Replacement Policy.
• Referral to the relevant authorities where the activity looks unlawful.

9. Reporting a violation to us

Think our network is being used in breach of this policy? Do get in touch, so that we can investigate it. Have a look at our Abuse Reporting Policy for full details on what to include. You can send reports to [email protected] along with the relevant IP addresses, timestamps and any backing evidence. The more detail you share, the faster we can act.

10. Cooperation with law enforcement

Valid legal requests get our cooperation, as do genuine law-enforcement investigations. A request needs to come through the proper legal channel, and it needs to name the IP addresses, the timestamps and the information sought. Our answer follows the applicable law and our Privacy Policy. Because we run a no-traffic-logs network, what we can hand over is limited to the account, billing and operational metadata we genuinely hold — we cannot produce records of the content of your traffic, because we simply do not keep them.

11. Changes to this policy

This Acceptable Use Policy may be revised now and again as our service moves on and the legal picture shifts. Where a change matters, the "Last updated" date above will show it. Keep using the service after an update and you accept the revised policy. Worth glancing at this page every now and then.

12. Contact

Something here unclear? Want to confirm that a particular use case is permitted before you start? Then reach us through our contact page or email [email protected]. We would sooner answer a question up front than deal with a breach later.