The Fair Use Credo
How Birdie Recon behaves on somebody else’s system. We publish it because we think you should be able to check.
- No watcher, no requestIf nobody has an alert on a course, we never touch it. We don’t crawl tee sheets speculatively and we don’t build a database of everything just in case. Demand comes first; the request follows it.
- We check once and share itIf fifty people are watching the same course for the same weekend, that’s still one check. Everyone watching gets the result of that single look. Adding customers doesn’t add load to the course.
- We go at each system’s paceEvery platform gets its own floor on how often we may check, and your plan can never go faster than that floor. If a system asks us to slow down, we slow down; if it tells us to stop, we stop.
- We don’t hide and we don’t sneakWe identify ourselves with a real, consistent User-Agent. No spoofing, no rotating identities, no proxy evasion, no solving CAPTCHAs, no fake accounts. If a site’s robots file says don’t, that is a reason to slow down or stop — never a thing to route around.
- We only read. You book.We read what a course publishes and we tell you what we saw. The booking is yours to make, in your own name, on the course’s own system, at the course’s own price. We never resell, list, advertise, or transfer a reservation. There is a structural prohibition in our code on reaching any checkout or payment page.
- We can’t promise you’ll get the timeWe don’t control the tee sheet and we don’t influence who gets what. Somebody else may be faster. This is a race we help you win, not one we can promise you.
What we mean by “the moment our recon spots it”
It’s a deliberate phrase and it describes our detection, not the world. We find an opening when we check — so the honest claim is that the alert leaves the instant a check turns something up, not that we saw it the instant it happened. Anyone reading a public tee sheet from the outside — us included — finds an opening at a check, not at the moment it happens. If that ever changes for us, because a course gives us a direct feed, we’ll tell you here rather than quietly start claiming more.
Where we hold money and card details
Nowhere. We never collect card details, store card data, proxy a payment, or hold your funds. Payment happens between you and the course, in the course’s own system.
Two different jobs: guest, and agent
Everything above is about us checking a tee sheet. That is us acting on our own behalf, on somebody else’s system. There is a second thing we could do — act on your account, because you asked us to — and it is a completely different job with a completely different set of rules. Plenty of people run both together and never say which one they’re doing. Here is where the line is.
When we’re checking a tee sheet, we’re a guest
Nobody invited us. So we behave like someone who knows that: we say who we are in every request, we go at the course platform’s pace and never faster, we take only what somebody actually asked us to watch, and if a site puts up a stop signal — a robots file, a rate limit, a block, a challenge page — we slow down or stop. We never route around it, never solve a CAPTCHA, never rotate identities or addresses to look like someone else. Being blockable is the deal. If a platform wants to shut us off, it needs to be able to find us to do it, and it can.
If you ask us to act on your own account, we’re your agent
That is your authority, not ours, and it comes with its own rules. We would hold your session, never your password. We would act only on a specific request you made, for that one tee time — never on standing permission to go do things on your account whenever we think it’s a good idea. And the structural prohibition in our code on reaching any checkout or payment page stays exactly where it is: your account is not a reason for us to be near a payment screen. If holding your session can’t be done safely at a course — some require a second factor, some deliberately slow down automation — we drop to something simpler and tell you why, rather than forcing it and putting your account at risk.
The two never blur
Being your agent doesn’t license being a bad guest. If you ask us to do something on your account, we still don’t sneak past a course’s protections to do it — your permission is yours to give, and it was never theirs. And being a good guest doesn’t license acting without being asked. Reading a tee sheet politely earns us no right to touch your account on our own initiative. Both halves have to hold, or neither means anything.
How far we go, and what it takes to go further
There is a ladder here, and we’re straight about which rung we’re on. Today we are on the bottom one: we send you a plain notice with a link to the course’s own booking page, and you take it from there. Everything above that is described below in the future tense, because that is where it is.
A Tee Pass would be a link that opens the course’s booking page with the details already filled in — nothing held, you still claim it. Tee Up would go one step further: the time would sit in a cart with your name on it and all that’s left would be for you to pay. The top rung is a Birdie — booked and done. That one is different in kind, not degree, and it is the only rung where we would be the ones completing a booking. None of the three is live. We’ll say so here when one is.
No written agreement, no booking. Without a signed agreement with the course or the platform, we never complete a purchase, full stop — a held cart is not a booking, and you finish it yourself. Where a course or platform does invite us in in writing, booking on your behalf becomes a different activity: an authorized partner booking into the operator’s own system at the operator’s own price. That permission is granted per platform, in writing, one at a time. It is never a global switch we flip, and we’ll name the platforms here when there are any. Right now there are none.
Whatever the rung, we never resell, list, advertise, or transfer a reservation, and we never hold your money or your card. That doesn’t move under any agreement.
Questions about any of this: support@birdierecon.com. Back to the home page.