Bot Ethics & Compliance

Safeguards at a Glance

• Respect robots.txt, meta robots directives, and published crawl-delay guidance before any request.
• Identify every request with the MyCareCostBot user agent and provide contact information for opt-out requests.
• Rate limit discovery and verification requests (3 seconds between searches, 1 second between requests to the same host, hard timeouts).
• Access only public, machine-readable price transparency files—never login-restricted or paywalled content.
• Stop immediately and log if a request encounters authentication, paywalls, CAPTCHA, or explicit disallow rules.
• Maintain an audit trail of discovered URLs, HTTP status codes, and block reasons for accountability.

Non-Circumvention Policy

The bot never attempts to bypass login systems, CAPTCHAs, paywalls, IP restrictions, or other technical access controls. If a request is blocked for any reason, the bot stops, records the block reason, and proceeds to the next facility.

Every request carries a descriptive user agent with contact information. Hospitals can opt out by emailing contact@mycarecost.net, and we maintain a manual blocklist for excluded domains.

Full Policy

The complete bot policy—including legal basis, compliance checklist, and audit procedures—is available in our open documentation.