How we get prices

Draft: for attorney review. Not in force yet.

Cuantomap shows the prices businesses post for their own menu items, services and activities. Every price links to where we found it and shows the date we last saw it there. This page explains where prices come from, what our crawler does and does not do, and how to stop it or fix a listing.

Where prices come from

1. The business's own website. Menu pages and price lists, including menus posted as PDFs or images.
2. The ordering or booking page the business uses itself. For example, the business's own page on Toast, Square, Clover, Booksy, Fresha or Vagaro, usually linked from its website.
3. Menu boards, photographed in person. A member of our team visits, asks staff first, and photographs the menu posted for customers.
4. Reports. Visitors and business owners tell us about wrong prices, closures and missing places. We check reports before we change anything.

The list of businesses comes from Overture Maps open data. See Data sources.

What we never read

• Delivery apps and marketplaces, such as Uber Eats, the DoorDash marketplace, Grubhub, Seamless and Postmates
• Listing, review and reservation sites, such as Yelp, Tripadvisor, Google Maps, OpenTable, Resy, MenuPages and Allmenus
• Deal and tour marketplaces, such as Groupon, ClassPass, Viator and GetYourGuide
• Social media
• Anything behind a login, a paywall or a CAPTCHA

What we keep

• Item and service names, prices and sizes
• Opening hours and address
• The page we got them from, and the date

We do not copy photos, logos, menu descriptions or reviews. We do not collect information about customers or staff.

Some menus are not in a simple format, such as PDFs and photos of menus. For those, we use an AI model to read the item names and prices. We check unusual results before they appear on the site.

Our crawler: CuantomapBot

CuantomapBot identifies itself with this user agent:

CuantomapBot/0.1 (+https://cuantomap.com/how-we-collect-prices/)

It follows these rules:

• It reads and obeys robots.txt, including Crawl-delay. Crawl-delay is not part of the official robots.txt standard, but CuantomapBot follows it.
• It sends one request at a time to a site and waits at least 8 seconds between requests to the same site. If your Crawl-delay is longer, it waits longer.
• When your server supports it, it asks only for pages that changed since its last visit.
• It slows down when a server says it is busy (HTTP 429 or 503) and stops after repeated errors.
• It does not log in, solve CAPTCHAs, hide behind proxies, or pretend to be a web browser.
• It does not fill in forms, place orders or book appointments.

[Placeholder: the IP addresses or reverse DNS name CuantomapBot uses, so site owners can check that a visit is really ours.]

How to block or slow CuantomapBot

Add lines like these to the robots.txt file at the root of your website.

Block it from your whole site:

User-agent: CuantomapBot
Disallow: /

Block one section only, such as /catering/:

User-agent: CuantomapBot
Disallow: /catering/

Slow it down to one request every 30 seconds:

User-agent: CuantomapBot
Crawl-delay: 30

CuantomapBot reads your robots.txt at the start of every crawl of your site, so a change applies from its next visit.

If your menu or booking page is hosted by a platform such as Toast or Square, you may not control that site's robots.txt. Email us and we will stop reading your page there.

Blocking the crawler stops new collection. It does not remove prices already on Cuantomap. To remove them, see below.

Fix a price or remove your business

• Anyone: use "Report a wrong price" on any business page.
• Business owners: claim your page at cuantomap.com/claim/ to correct prices, hours or details. Claiming is free.
• Removal: email hello@cuantomap.com with the link to your page and what you want removed. If you can, write from an email address at your business's own website.

We aim to reply within [2 business days] and to fix verified errors within [5 business days]. Our Corrections and removals policy has the details.

Data sources

Business list: Overture Maps Foundation, overturemaps.org. Places data is available under the Community Data License Agreement Permissive 2.0, with some records under the Apache License 2.0 (Foursquare) and CC0 (AllThePlaces).

Neighborhoods: © OpenStreetMap contributors. Available under the Open Database License.

[Counsel to confirm the full notices, including Foursquare's NOTICE file and any other credits in the divisions data. See brief, question 9.]

Contact

hello@cuantomap.com [not yet set up]

Drafting notes for counsel (remove before publishing)

• The DoorDash marketplace is blocked. A business's own DoorDash Storefront site (order.online) is treated as that business's own ordering page and may be read. Other platform-hosted storefronts are treated the same way.
• The rules above match the crawler settings in the code: the user agent, the 8-second minimum gap, robots.txt with Crawl-delay, back-off on 429 and 503, and no logins, proxies or CAPTCHA solving. The robots.txt refresh interval and the published IP list still need to be set.
• Overture's attribution page also credits geoBoundaries, Esri Community Maps contributors and LINZ (CC BY 4.0) in the divisions theme. If our neighborhood records come from those sources, their credits belong here too.