AquaCalcBot
If you run one of the shops in our price comparison and you have found this page in your access logs, this is what we are doing and how to make us stop.
Short version: AquaCalcBot reads your public product catalogue so we can show shoppers who has a plant in stock and what it costs. We send them to you with a normal link — no affiliate tags, no commission, no sponsored placement. We read prices and stock only. If you would rather we did not, say so and we will remove your shop; you do not need to give a reason.
How to identify us
Every request we make carries this user agent:
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| User agent | AquaCalcBot/1.0 (+https://www.aquacalc.uk/bot.php) |
| Operated by | SaneChoice, Moulsham Mill, Parkway, Chelmsford, CM2 7PX, United Kingdom |
| On behalf of | aquacalc.uk — a free tool for UK planted-aquarium hobbyists |
We do not disguise ourselves as a web browser, and we do not use residential proxies or any other means of avoiding bot detection. If your site refuses us, we stop asking — see what happens when you block us below.
What we read
Wherever a shop publishes its catalogue as JSON — which every Shopify store does, and which most name explicitly in their own /agents.md under “Read-Only Browsing” — we read that, because it costs one request per 250 products instead of a request per page.
| What | Detail |
|---|---|
| Pages requested | Your public product listings only. One or two requests per catalogue for a JSON-published shop; a small number of listing pages where that is the only option. |
| How often | Every 15 minutes for a JSON read; hourly at most where we have to read listing pages. |
| Fields kept | Product title, price, stock status, format (pot, tissue culture, on wood), and the product URL. |
| Images | Never requested. We do not hotlink or copy product photography. |
| Anything behind a login | Never. We hold no account with any shop we read. |
| Carts and checkouts | Never requested. We never place an order, add to a cart, or submit any form. |
| Customer data | None exists to read and we would not read it if it did. |
How we behave
- We honour
robots.txt, includingCrawl-delay. If your file asks for ten seconds between requests, that is what we wait, even though it makes the run take minutes. - One request at a time. We never open parallel connections to a shop.
- We accept compressed responses, so we take as little of your bandwidth as we can.
- We back off on errors and we do not retry a refusal.
- We cache. A page view on AquaCalc never triggers a request to your site; readers are served from a snapshot we hold.
If you block us
A 403, 401 or 451 is treated as a decision, not as a temporary fault. We stop that run immediately rather than retrying, and the failure is raised to us. We will not raise our request rate, change how we identify ourselves, or alter our requests to get around a block. If you want us gone, blocking us works — but an email is easier for both of us and means we can take your listings down properly rather than leaving them to go stale.
How we present your shop
- No affiliate links and no commission. Links to your products are plain links. We are not paid if somebody buys.
- No sponsored placement. Ordering is by price, stock and the reader’s own filters. It cannot be bought.
- Out of stock is never shown as cheapest. A price nobody can pay is not treated as a price.
- Like for like. A tissue-culture cup is never priced against a potted plant.
- We show when we last looked, so a reader knows whether a price is minutes or hours old.
If we have your prices, stock, formats or postage wrong, tell us and we will fix it — that is a bug on our side and we would rather know.
Removal, or a correction
Use the feedback form and say which shop you are. We will confirm, and remove your catalogue on request. We do not ask for a reason and we will not argue with you about it.
If you would rather be listed but want something changed — a different category read, a format we are getting wrong, postage terms that have moved — that is welcome too, and is usually a five-minute fix.
Who operates this website
AquaCalc is built, managed and owned by SaneChoice, Moulsham Mill, Parkway, Chelmsford, CM2 7PX, United Kingdom.