Trust & data
How Throttle works, and how it pays for itself
A plain-English summary. The Privacy Policy and Terms govern.
The short version
- Browsing the market costs nothing and does not require an account. No ads anywhere on a listing page, ever.
- We never sell your personal information. Not your email, not your name, not your saved searches, not your watchlist, not a record of what you looked at.
- We do publish and license aggregated, de-identified market data — statistics about machines and prices, computed across thousands of people, with nothing in them that points back at any one of you. Dealers, lenders, insurers and researchers pay for that.
- We keep a log of how the site is used — which filters get used, which categories get looked at — with your identity replaced by a salted hash and never the words you typed into the search box.
- Our crawler reads dealer websites, says who it is, obeys
robots.txt, and stops within a day of being asked.
How we make money
Three things, and these are all of them:
- Throttle+ subscriptions.
- A limited one-time BETA Supporter offer, capped and dated.
- Licensing aggregated, de-identified market data to businesses.
What we record
- A log of site use (a search, a view, a save), to fix Throttle, train our own models and build market statistics.
- Your identity there is a salted one-way hash; signed-in rows keep your user id so we can honour a deletion request.
- We train models on de-identified data and public posts, and may license de-identified data products and models; none of that sells your personal information.
The details: the Privacy Policy.
What we never record
| Never stored | What we keep instead |
|---|---|
| Your IP address | A country code in the log; elsewhere a salted hash, or a few minutes in memory to rate-limit |
| Your browser's user agent string | A coarse family such as safari-mobile or bot |
| Your email, name, phone number or anything you typed about yourself | Nothing. These never reach the log at all |
| The full page that referred you | The hostname only |
| The words you type in the search box | The shape of the search: which filters, how many results, how it was sorted |
Data we license meets the CCPA/CPRA de-identified standard, and we publicly commit never to attempt to re-identify it; every licensee is bound to the same rule by the Data Licence.
The promises
- No ads on listing pages, and no dealer can pay for a better position.
- We never sell your personal information, or share it for cross-context behavioural advertising.
- An honest crawler: it names itself, obeys
robots.txt, reads dealers' own websites and never anything behind a login. Any marketplace or aggregator we read is listed on the ThrottleBot page. - Dealers opt out with one email to [email protected]; removed within 24 hours.
Not promising
Prices come from dealer sites and can be wrong; confirm with the seller.
What you control
- Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track. If your browser sends either signal, we honour it — the behaviour log stops recording you.
- Delete your account. From your settings. It removes your profile, saved searches, watchlist and the user id on your event rows; the Terms and the Privacy Policy say exactly what survives.
- Ask what we hold. Email us and we will tell you, and export it.
- Your full rights — access, correction, deletion, portability, and the rest — are in the privacy policy, with the addresses to use.
Tell us
Spot something wrong? Email [email protected]. Binding: Terms, Privacy Policy, Data Licence, API Terms, Community Guidelines.