Terms

Scout takes an advertisement you send it and reports what it can establish about the product, the price history, the seller and the reviews. It shows the working, dates every figure, and names the checks that failed.

Scout is information, not advice, and not a verdict on legality. It does not tell you whether a seller is a fraud, whether a listing is a scam, or whether you should buy something. It reports facts you can check and leaves the conclusion to you. Nothing on a card is financial, legal or professional advice.

A card also carries no guarantee about the transaction. Scout is not a party to your purchase, does not hold your money, does not ship anything, and cannot help you get a refund.

You need to be at least 13, old enough to use Instagram in your country, and able to enter into a contract where you live. If you are under 18, use Scout with a parent or guardian’s knowledge.

Scout signs you in with a link sent to your email. There is no password. Links last 15 minutes and work once, so anyone with access to your inbox can sign in as you — keep it secure, and tell us if you think someone else has.

You do not need an account to read a card someone sent you. An account exists so that your own checks, saved items and stats have somewhere to live.

Use Scout for your own buying decisions. Do not:

• —Send content you have no right to send, or anything unlawful, harassing or sexual.
• —Automate submissions, scrape the site, or resell Scout’s output as your own product.
• —Try to break the service, probe it for weaknesses, or work around its rate limits.
• —Use Scout to build a competing dataset or to train a model on its output.
• —Post reviews you were paid for, reviews about products you never handled, or reviews written to move an average.

Scout may remove content and close accounts that break these rules, usually without warning, because the alternative is a review corpus worth nothing.

You keep ownership of what you write. By posting a review you give Scout a worldwide, royalty-free licence to display, store and distribute it as part of the product, including on public card pages.

Scout’s purchase badge says a reviewer says they bought it, because Scout has no order record and will not use the word verified for something it has not verified.

If you close your account, your reviews stay with your name removed. Other people have already read the averages those ratings produced, and quietly changing them afterwards would be its own kind of dishonesty. This is explained in full on the deletion page before you decide.

Scout will get things wrong. Products are identified from compressed screenshots, prices change faster than any cache, sellers edit their listings, and sources go down. Every figure on a card carries the date it was read so you can judge how stale it is.

A card with no warnings on it is not a guarantee. It means the checks Scout ran did not surface a problem, and the card names the ones that could not run at all.

The service is provided “as is”, without warranties of any kind — express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement — to the fullest extent the law allows.

Scout takes no money from merchants, sellers or brands. There are no affiliate links, no paid placements and no way to pay for a softer verdict. Alternatives print what is worse about them at the same size as what is better. If this ever changes, it will be disclosed on the card itself and not in this document.

Sharing a card gives out a public URL containing the analysis and nothing identifying you. Anyone with the link can open it, and search engines may index it. Scout may remove a public card at any time, and may update it as the underlying data changes.

Scout owns the site, the software, the mark and the cards it produces. Product names, images and listing text belong to their owners and appear for identification and commentary. You may share a card link freely; you may not republish Scout’s analysis as your own or strip its attribution.

Scout is a free service under active development. Features may change or disappear, checks may be added or retired, and there is no uptime commitment. Material changes to these terms will be posted here with a new date at the top, and announced in the DM thread if they affect what you have already sent.

You can close your account at any time from settings, or by one of the routes on the deletion page. Closing is reversible for 30 days and permanent after that. Scout may suspend or close an account that breaks the acceptable-use rules above.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Scout is not liable for indirect or consequential loss, lost profits, or loss arising from a purchase you made or did not make after reading a card. Scout’s total liability to you is limited to the amount you have paid it, which is nothing.

Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including for fraud or for death or personal injury caused by negligence. Some jurisdictions do not allow these exclusions, in which case they apply only as far as the law permits.

These terms are governed by the laws of India, and the courts of Bengaluru, Karnataka have exclusive jurisdiction — without affecting any right you have to bring a claim in your own country of residence where local law grants it.

Questions about these terms go to hello@scout.wiki, or into the thread with @scout.wiki. Privacy questions are answered on the privacy page.