Versión en español: https://acform.es/bot

The Precio crawler

PrecioApp is the user agent of Precio, a mobile app for price-drop alerts. If you got here from your server logs, this page explains what it is, what it requests and how to exclude it.

Current status: the app has not been released yet.

Precio is still in development and has not been distributed through any app store. Therefore no legitimate traffic with this user agent should exist yet.

If you are seeing requests identifying themselves as PrecioApp, they either come from an internal development test, or someone is using our name without being us. Either way we want to know: write to info [at] acform.es with a sample of your logs.

In short: Precio downloads product pages that its users have added by hand, in order to read the price. It does not crawl sites, does not follow links and does not look for new content. Every request is made by the user's phone, not by a server of ours. To exclude your domain, write to info [at] acform.es and we will exclude it, no questions asked.

How to block it

Write to info [at] acform.es stating the domain. You do not need to justify or explain the request: making it is enough.

About robots.txt: support is written and tested, but it is not active yet in the app. We are not going to claim that we honour a directive that is not currently being checked. Until it is — and this page says so — email is the valid way to be excluded.

If you would rather have the rule ready, the token we will use is User-agent: PrecioApp. Even so, please write to us: until the check is live, email is the only thing that guarantees exclusion.

What Precio is

A mobile app that alerts its user when the price drops on a product they saved themselves. The user pastes the URL of a specific product, sets a target price or a discount percentage, and gets a notification when it is met.

There is no catalogue, no search engine, no comparison service and no price database. The app has no server: each installation only checks its own user's products.

What the crawler does exactly

Downloads the product page whose URL the user entered, and nothing else.
Extracts the price, currency and availability from it, preferably from the structured data the page itself publishes (schema.org JSON-LD, microdata or Open Graph).
Leaves at least 30 minutes between two checks of the same product. No bursts.
Always identifies itself with this User-Agent, without exception:
```
PrecioApp/1.0 (+https://acform.es/bot)
```
Honours the Retry-After header.
On a 429 or a 403, it disables tracking of that product and tells the user the store does not allow the request. It does not retry.

What it does not do

It does not crawl. It does not follow links, does not explore the site, does not discover new URLs. It only visits addresses a user has explicitly pasted.
It does not pretend to be a browser. It sends no browser headers, handles no cookies and uses no headless browser.
It does not try to bypass any protection. No captchas, no Cloudflare, no verification walls. If access is restricted, that is accepted and the product is marked as unavailable.
It does not access anything behind a login, does not create accounts and does not submit forms.
It does not copy content. It stores no descriptions, no reviews, no page text.
It does not buy anything and does not interact with the cart.

What data it stores

From each check, only: price, currency, availability and date. Nothing else.

That data is stored on the user's own device and is not sent anywhere. There is no centralised copy of your store's prices; we do not share it, publish it or sell it.

If the user enables the image view — off by default — the app stores the image URL that the page declares, not the image, and loads it from your server when displaying it.

Why the traffic comes from many different IPs

Precio is not a centralised crawler. Each request is made by the user's phone, from their own connection. There is no server of ours requesting your pages.

This has a practical consequence worth knowing: requests arrive from many different residential IPs and there is no range you can block. The only stable thing is the User-Agent string. That is why we identify ourselves consistently and why this page exists: it is the only way for you to say "no" and to verify that we comply.

In terms of volume, each user only checks the products they have saved, at most once every 30 minutes each.

On impersonation

Anyone can write PrecioApp in their own User-Agent. We cannot prove by IP that a request is ours, because they do not originate from any infrastructure of ours, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

If you observe traffic identifying itself as PrecioApp whose behaviour does not match what is described here — high volume, link traversal, bursts of requests, attempts to reach private areas — write to us with a sample of your logs. It is useful information for us and we will help you characterise it.

Contact

info [at] acform.es

Write to us to request the exclusion of a domain, to report anomalous behaviour, or with any question about this page. Exclusion requests are honoured without asking for explanations.