Fair use policy

1. What fair use means

The Acceptable use policy is about how you behave. This one is about how much you use, and it exists for a duller reason: shared systems fall over when a small number of people use them at a scale nobody designed for.

We do not publish hard numbers, because a published number becomes a target and because the honest limit depends on your trade, your area and your season. The rule is simply this: use ToolBox the way a real business or a real household would. If you do that, you will never encounter this document again.

2. Leads

• Leads go only to tradespeople whose phone, identity and address we have verified and who work that trade. Each lead goes first to those who can work in the window asked for, and among them, in this order, to those who cover the area and work nearest the job, then to those furthest through the required checks for that trade, as section 7 of the Platform terms sets out.
• A lead is for deciding whether to quote on that job. That is the only thing it is for.
• Do not use a homeowner's details from a lead for marketing, for a mailing list, or for a job they did not ask about. Section 69 of POPIA prohibits electronic direct marketing without the right consent, and doing it is a ground for removal.
• Do not pass a lead to another business.
• Decline a lead you will not quote on. The homeowner sees your answer straight away, rather than keeping a place open for a quote that never comes. If homeowners tell us you keep leaving them waiting, we take it up with you under Warnings, suspension and removal.

3. Messaging

• Message the people you are actually doing business with.
• No bulk or templated messaging to homeowners who have not contacted you.
• No sending the same message repeatedly, and no messaging someone after they have asked you to stop.
• Do not use messages to advertise anything other than the job at hand.

4. Job posts and quotes

• Post the jobs you actually want done. Repeatedly posting jobs you never intend to award is a breach of the Acceptable use policy, not just of this one.
• Do not repost the same job over and over to get in front of more tradespeople. It reaches the same people, and it annoys them.
• Photographs and voice notes are generously sized, but they are for describing a job. Do not use ToolBox as file storage.

5. Storage and media

Portfolio projects, job photographs and documents have sensible per-item and per-account limits, shown in the app where they apply. If you need more room for a genuine reason, ask us at help@toolbox.africa and we will usually say yes.

We may compress images for display. We keep the original where you may need it later, such as evidence on a complaint.

6. Automation and access

• Use the apps and the website. Do not scrape, crawl, or use a bot, a script or an automated tool against ToolBox without our written permission.
• Do not attempt to bypass rate limits, security controls or access restrictions.
• Do not resell access to ToolBox, or operate an account on behalf of tradespeople as a service, without an agreement with us.
• No load testing, penetration testing or security research against our systems without written permission. If you find a vulnerability, please tell us at security@toolbox.africa rather than exploring it. We will not pursue anyone who reports in good faith and does not exploit or disclose what they found.

7. One account

One person, one account. One business, one profile. Do not open a second account to receive more leads, to leave another review, or to get around a restriction. If you genuinely operate two distinct businesses, tell us and we will set them up properly.

8. Subscriptions

A paid plan is for the business it was bought for. Sharing one set of credentials across several businesses, or reselling access, is a breach. If you have several people in one business who need access, tell us and we will make that work.

9. What happens if you go past fair use

Almost always, a conversation. We will tell you what we are seeing and what needs to change, and give you a reasonable chance to change it.

If it continues, we may throttle the activity, restrict the specific feature, or apply the sanctions policy. We move straight to a restriction, without a conversation first, only where the activity is harming the platform or other users right now: an attack, a scraper, a flood of messages.