Terms of service

1. About these terms

These terms apply when you use Border Bot at border.bot, including the website and its free tools, the dashboard, the REST API and the MCP server for AI assistants (together, the “service”). Border Bot provides the service. In these terms, “Border Bot”, “we” and “us” mean the provider of the service, and “you” means the person or organisation using it.

By creating an account, buying credits or using the service, you agree to these terms. If you use the service for an organisation, you confirm that you can bind it, and “you” includes that organisation. Our privacy policy explains how we handle personal data.

The service is built for businesses. Some terms differ for consumers, meaning individuals using the service wholly or mainly outside their trade, business, craft or profession. Where they differ, we say so.

2. What Border Bot is and is not

Border Bot gives you information to help you prepare cross-border shipments: suggested HS and national tariff codes, estimates of duties, taxes and fees (landed cost), de minimis thresholds, checks for restricted and prohibited goods, screening against sanctions and denied-party lists, and findings about a product’s country of origin.

Border Bot is not a licensed customs broker, customs agent or representative, freight forwarder, tax adviser or legal adviser. We do not make declarations, act as your direct or indirect customs representative, or deal with any customs or tax authority for you. Nothing in the service is legal, tax or customs advice.

Our results are not binding on any authority. Only a customs authority can give a binding ruling on classification, origin or value (for example, a UK Advance Tariff Ruling, an EU Binding Tariff Information decision or a US CBP ruling). Duties and taxes are assessed by customs when goods are declared, and the amount charged can differ from our estimate.

3. Checking results before you rely on them

Results are generated partly by automated systems and AI models, working from tariff schedules, rulings, legal notices and lists published by governments and other sources. Those sources change, sometimes without notice, and may be incomplete. AI models can misread a product or a source. A confidence score or a “needs review” flag is our estimate of reliability, not a guarantee.

You agree that:

• you will check each result with the relevant customs authority or a licensed customs broker before you rely on it to make a declaration, set a price, collect duties or taxes from a buyer, or decide whether goods can be shipped;
• you remain responsible for the accuracy of everything you declare to customs, including classification, value and origin, and for meeting duties of care that the law places on you as importer or exporter (for example, the “reasonable care” duty on US importers of record);
• a sanctions or denied-party match is a lead to investigate, not a finding, and no match does not mean a person or shipment is cleared. You remain responsible for complying with sanctions and export-control law;
• a restricted-goods result does not list every licence, permit, standard or agency rule that may apply to your goods.

The results depend on what you give us. Incomplete or inaccurate product details, values or countries will produce unreliable results.

4. Accounts, workspaces and API keys

• You must be at least 18 to create an account. Give accurate details and keep them up to date.
• Keep your sign-in details and API keys secret. Tell us at info@border.bot straight away if you think someone has used them without permission. You can revoke keys in the dashboard.
• Workspace admins control billing, API keys, members, AI-assistant connections and settings for their workspace.
• You are responsible for everything done through your account, your workspace’s API keys and the AI assistants you connect, including the credits they use.

5. Using Border Bot from AI assistants

You can connect AI assistants and agents (such as Claude, ChatGPT, Codex or Cursor) to the MCP server. When you approve a connection, you choose the workspace it bills and the permissions it has. The assistant then acts for you: requests it makes count as yours and use your workspace’s credits.

The assistant is provided by a third party under its own terms. We do not control how it interprets, summarises or presents our results, and we are not responsible for what it says. If an assistant repeats one of our results, the same limits apply as if you had read it in the dashboard. You can disconnect assistants at any time in the dashboard.

6. Free tools

The free classifier, landed-cost calculator, origin finder and air waybill generator on the website are for trying the service. Each visitor gets a small number of free runs, and we may change or withdraw them at any time. Free runs may be limited or unavailable from VPN, hosting and proxy networks, and are never available over Tor. Don’t use automation, scripts, VPNs, proxies, multiple browsers or devices, or any other way to get more free runs or get around the limits or the bot check. For regular or automated use, create an account and use the API.

7. Shipping documents

Border Bot can prepare shipping documents, such as air waybills, from details you enter. You agree to this section each time you make one, on the website, in the dashboard, over the API or from an AI assistant.

We prepare documents; we don’t issue or carry anything. We are not a carrier, an airline, a carrier’s agent, a freight forwarder or a customs broker. We don’t issue, accept, sign, execute, file or transmit any document for you, and we are not a party to any contract of carriage. An air waybill made here is a draft until the issuing carrier or its authorised agent accepts the goods and executes it. The conditions of contract printed on it are IATA’s standard wording, included for convenience; the carrier’s own conditions of carriage and tariffs decide the contract.

Acceptance is never guaranteed. An airline, handling agent, forwarder, customs or any other authority may refuse, reject, correct or ask you to re-issue a document, may require the same data electronically (for example as an e-AWB) instead of on paper, and may apply its own rules about stock, numbering, format and printing. We don’t promise that any document will be accepted by anyone.

You are responsible for what’s on it. You must make sure every particular is true, complete and lawful: the parties, addresses, goods description, pieces, weights, dimensions, values, charges, routing and signatures. You must only use an air waybill number the issuing carrier has allocated to you or authorised you to use (a valid check digit does not make a number yours), declare dangerous goods with the separate declaration the regulations require, and comply with the carrier’s conditions, IATA rules, and customs, export-control and sanctions law. Chargeable weights and totals are worked out from what you enter; check them against the carrier’s rates.

Don’t misuse it. You must not make a document to deceive anyone, to impersonate a carrier or agent, with a number or signature you aren’t entitled to use, or to move goods unlawfully. We may refuse to make documents and close access where we suspect misuse, and we may report it where the law requires.

What we aren’t liable for. To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for shipments that are refused, rejected, offloaded, held, delayed, returned or seized; for storage, demurrage, rebooking, re-issue, courier or correction costs; for freight differences, duties, taxes, fines or penalties; or for claims by carriers, agents, consignees or authorities, where any of these arise from a document made with Border Bot or from its contents. The limits in Our liability apply, and nothing here affects rights the law does not let us exclude, including your statutory rights as a consumer.

Your responsibility to us. If you use the service for business, you will cover our reasonable losses and costs arising from a third-party claim caused by a document you made, its contents, or your use of it.

8. Acceptable use

You must not:

• use the service to break any law, including customs, sanctions and export-control law, or to help anyone evade duties, taxes, restrictions or sanctions;
• scrape, crawl or bulk-download the service, or copy its results, tariff data or source data into a database, product or service that competes with Border Bot;
• resell, sublicense or rebrand the service or its data wholesale, or give third parties access to your account or API keys, without our written agreement. Showing results to your own customers as part of your business (for example, duties at checkout) is allowed;
• get around rate limits, credit charges, free-run limits or security measures, including by creating extra accounts or workspaces;
• probe, scan, load-test, overload or disrupt the service, or try to access other customers’ data;
• reverse engineer the service, except where the law allows it despite this restriction;
• submit malicious code, unlawful content, or personal data the service doesn’t need, including special category data such as health information.

We may limit, suspend or block access that breaks these rules or puts the service or other customers at risk.

9. Credits, payment and refunds

• Classifications, calculations and other paid actions use prepaid credits. The pricing page and the API’s pricing endpoint show what each action costs. Some checks are free.
• You buy credits in packages through Stripe, our payment provider. Prices are shown in US dollars and exclude taxes unless stated. Credits belong to the workspace that bought them and can’t be transferred or exchanged for cash.
• Credits are taken just before an action runs. If it fails, they are returned to your balance automatically and the refund appears in your credit history. A request that repeats an Idempotency-Key returns the original result without a second charge.
• Credits don’t expire. If we ever introduce expiry, it will apply only to credits bought after we give you notice.
• Free credits we give, for example to new workspaces, have no cash value and are not refundable.
• Except as set out below or where the law requires, credits are non-refundable, including when a result turns out to be wrong. If a result was clearly wrong because of a fault in the service, tell us and we will look at returning the credits.
• If we close your account for reasons other than your breach of these terms, or stop providing the service, we will refund the price of your unused credits.

If you are a consumer in the UK or the EU, you may cancel a credit purchase within 14 days of buying it by emailing info@border.bot, and we will refund unused credits. If you use credits during those 14 days, you are asking us to start the service straight away, and we will deduct the value of the credits you used.

We may change prices and the credits an action uses. A change applies to purchases and actions after it takes effect. We will give at least 30 days’ notice, by email or in the dashboard, before an action uses more credits than before.

10. Your data

You keep your rights in the product details, files, URLs and other content you submit (“your data”). You give us permission to use your data to provide, secure, support and improve the service, as described in our privacy policy. We keep records of classifications, calculations and checks, with the data they used, so that results can be explained later.

You confirm that you have the right to submit your data and that our use of it as described will not break any law or anyone’s rights. When you ask us to read a web page, you confirm that you may ask us to fetch it.

You may use the results for your own business, including sharing them with your customers, brokers and carriers, subject to these terms.

11. Personal data about other people

Some features process personal data about people other than you, such as a buyer’s or consignee’s name for denied-party screening. For that data, you are the controller and we process it for you as your processor. You confirm that you have a lawful basis to share it with us and have told those people as the law requires. As your processor, we will:

• process it only to provide the service and on your documented instructions, unless the law requires otherwise;
• make sure the people who process it are bound by confidentiality;
• keep it secure with appropriate technical and organisational measures;
• use only the sub-processors named in our privacy policy, under written terms that protect the data, and tell you before we add or replace one so you can object;
• help you respond to requests from individuals and meet your security, breach and impact-assessment obligations;
• tell you without undue delay if we become aware of a personal data breach affecting it;
• delete or return it when our service to you ends, except records that the law, or the customs record-keeping described in our privacy policy, requires us to keep;
• give you the information you reasonably need to show compliance with these duties.

12. Data sources and our content

The service uses tariff schedules, rulings, legal texts, exchange rates and sanctions and restricted-goods lists published by governments, customs authorities and other third parties. Those sources belong to their publishers and are used under their own terms and licences, some of which require attribution. If you republish source data, you must follow its licence. These terms give you no more rights in third-party data than its licence does.

Apart from your data and third-party sources, the service, its software, design, text, compiled data and results belong to us or our licensors. We give you a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the service and its results under these terms while your account is open, and to keep using results you obtained afterwards. If you send us feedback, we may use it without any obligation to you.

13. Availability and changes to the service

We work to keep the service available and accurate, but we don’t promise it will be uninterrupted or error-free. We may change, add or remove features, data sources, countries and API versions. We will give reasonable notice of changes that significantly reduce what you have paid for, and we announce API version retirements in advance on the API’s versions page.

14. No warranty

To the extent the law allows, the service and its results are provided “as is” and “as available”. We make no promise that any result is correct, complete, current or suitable for a particular purpose, or that customs or any other authority will accept it. If you are a consumer, we will provide the service with reasonable care and skill, and this section does not affect your statutory rights.

15. Our liability

What we never exclude. Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or any other liability that cannot be excluded or limited by law. If you are a consumer, nothing in these terms affects your statutory rights, including those under the Consumer Rights Act 2015.

If you use the service for business, to the extent the law allows:

• we are not liable for duties, taxes, fees, interest, penalties or fines; for goods that are seized, detained, returned, destroyed or delayed; for refused shipments or lost sales; or for the cost of correcting declarations, where these result from using or relying on a result;
• we are not liable for loss of profit, revenue, business, goodwill, opportunity or anticipated savings, for loss or corruption of data, or for any indirect or consequential loss, however it arises;
• our total liability to you for all claims arising from or connected with the service or these terms, whether in contract, tort (including negligence) or otherwise, is limited to the greater of US$100 and the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the event that gave rise to the claim.

If you are a consumer, we are responsible for loss you suffer that is a foreseeable result of our breaking these terms or failing to use reasonable care and skill. We are not responsible for loss that was not foreseeable, or for business losses. Duties and taxes that were legally due on your goods are not a loss we cause, even if our estimate was lower.

Your responsibility. If you use the service for business, you will cover our reasonable losses and costs arising from a third-party claim caused by your breach of these terms or your unlawful use of the service.

16. Suspension and closing your account

You can stop using the service at any time, and ask us to close your account by emailing info@border.bot.

We may suspend or close an account or workspace, or revoke API keys and AI-assistant connections, if you seriously or repeatedly break these terms, if you don’t pay, if we must do so by law, or to protect the service or other customers. We will tell you why unless the law or security prevents it, and, where it is reasonable, give you a chance to fix the problem first. We may also close the service, with at least 30 days’ notice to account holders.

When an account closes, your right to use the service ends. Sections that by their nature should continue, including those on liability, data sources and the law that applies, stay in force.

17. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms, for example when the service or the law changes. We will give account holders at least 30 days’ notice of changes that materially affect them, by email or in the dashboard, unless a change is needed sooner for legal or security reasons. The date at the end of this page shows when they last changed. If you don’t agree to a change, you can stop using the service and, if you are a consumer, ask for a refund of unused credits before the change takes effect.

18. Law and disputes

These terms, and any dispute about them or the service, are governed by the law of England and Wales. If you use the service for business, the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.

If you are a consumer, you can bring proceedings in the courts of England and Wales or, if you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland, in the courts there. If you live in the EU, you also keep the protection of the mandatory consumer laws of your country and can bring proceedings there.

If a court finds part of these terms unenforceable, the rest stays in force. If we don’t enforce a right straight away, we can still enforce it later. You may not transfer these terms without our consent; we may transfer them to a business that takes over the service, and will tell you if we do. Nobody else has rights under these terms.

19. Contact

Email info@border.bot with questions about these terms, or to tell us about a problem.