Acceptable Use Policy

1. Agreeing to this policy

This Acceptable Use Policy applies to everyone who uses appraise-assist or connects to mcp.appraise-assist.com — the tool library service behind it. It works alongside our Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, and Data & Personal Information Handling page. By using the service you agree to follow this policy. If you don't agree to it, don't use the service. Your AI provider's own usage policies (Anthropic's or OpenAI's) also apply when you use appraise-assist inside their products.

appraise-assist is operated by Ruby Appraisals, a residential real-estate appraisal firm in Colorado. You can reach us at admin@appraise-assist.com.

2. Who this is for

appraise-assist is built for professional use by licensed or trainee residential real-estate appraisers and their staff, working in the United States, who are 18 or older. It isn't a consumer product, and it isn't a substitute for a licensed appraiser's own judgment.

3. What you're actually using

It helps to be clear about what "the service" is, because several of the rules below turn on it. appraise-assist is a tool library: a set of scripted steps, rules, playbooks, checklists, and scripts that your own AI assistant (Claude today, and ChatGPT where supported) follows on a guided path while it helps you work a file.

Your AI assistant — Claude today, and ChatGPT where supported — calls appraise-assist to run one scripted step at a time: a calculation, a parse, a check, a file generation. Our server, mcp.appraise-assist.com, receives only the files that step needs, in one of three ways: a file your assistant attaches and passes to our tool for that call; your own Google Drive workfile folder, if you connect one and grant us access (we read and write only inside the folder you chose); or a small local helper you install, which sends that step's files from a folder on your computer and saves results back there. We process those files only for the duration of the call; we don't keep your files — temporary working copies are deleted when the call ends, and your own folder, on your computer or in your connected Drive, is the only place they're kept. The request itself — the tool or step called, and any short parameters your assistant sent with it, such as a workfile name — does reach our server, so don't put personal information in file or folder names.

See Data & Personal Information Handling for the full picture of what our servers do and don't touch.

4. Lawful, professional use only

Use appraise-assist only for lawful, professional residential appraisal work. Don't use it, or let it be used, for anything illegal, for personal non-appraisal purposes unrelated to your professional work, or for any purpose this policy or our Terms of Service prohibits.

5. Only use data you're allowed to use

You're responsible for the data you feed into appraise-assist and into your AI assistant. That means:

• Respecting the rules of attribution and use set by your MLS or data provider for any MLS data you bring in.
• Honoring client confidentiality and the confidentiality obligations USPAP places on you.
• Complying with privacy laws that apply to your work, including the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act where it applies to you.
• Complying with the terms of any lender, client, or data-source agreement you're a party to, including any MLS rule about sharing listing data with an AI provider.

appraise-assist's scripts include steps that try to find and mask personal information before it's shared further, but that's best-effort only — see Privacy Policy and Data & Personal Information Handling. We don't guarantee all personal information gets caught. You decide what goes into your AI assistant and into any tool, and you're the one responsible for not sharing what you're not allowed to share.

6. Keep your account to yourself

Don't share your appraise-assist login or connection credentials with anyone else, and don't let anyone else use your account. If you have staff who need access, that's fine — but each person should have their own account, not a shared one. You're responsible for activity that happens under your account.

If you believe your account or credentials have been compromised, tell us right away at admin@appraise-assist.com.

7. Don't attack, overload, probe, or scrape our service

Don't do anything that could disrupt, damage, overload, or impair mcp.appraise-assist.com or appraise-assist.com, or interfere with anyone else's use of them. That includes, without limitation:

• Denial-of-service attempts or anything designed to flood or overload the service.
• Probing, scanning, or testing the service's security without our prior written permission.
• Scraping, crawling, or systematically harvesting data, content, or structure from our service.
• Trying to bypass rate limits, authentication, or access controls.
• Introducing malware, viruses, or other harmful code.

8. Don't reverse engineer or copy what we built

Don't reverse engineer, probe, or attempt to extract the server-side implementation of the hosted service at mcp.appraise-assist.com, except to the extent a law that can't be waived by contract says we can't stop you. The playbooks, rules, and instructions our tool library returns to your assistant are yours to read and follow for your own appraisal work; the next paragraph covers what you may not do with them.

Our playbooks, rules, checklists, and scripts are the product. Don't copy, extract, scrape, or otherwise reproduce them for redistribution, for publication, or to build or help build a competing product or service. You're welcome to use them, through the service, to do your own appraisal work — that's what you're paying for — but the tool library itself isn't yours to take and resell or repackage.

9. No misleading, fraudulent, or discriminatory appraisals

Never use appraise-assist to produce, support, or help produce an appraisal, valuation, narrative, adjustment, or any other output that is misleading or fraudulent, or that misrepresents a property, a comparable, a market condition, or anything else in a report.

Never use appraise-assist in a way that violates fair-lending or fair-housing law, or that applies a discriminatory factor — directly or indirectly — based on a protected characteristic under the Fair Housing Act, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, or any other applicable fair-lending or fair-housing law. Using appraise-assist doesn't change your fair-housing and fair-lending obligations; they're still entirely yours to meet.

10. Normal professional use, not automated mass use

appraise-assist is built for an appraiser (and their staff) working files the way an appraisal business actually works them — a person, or a firm's staff on their own accounts, driving the work at human pace. Normal day-to-day professional use, including a busy caseload, is exactly what it's for.

What isn't allowed is automated or mass use that goes beyond that: scripting or bulk-calling the service outside of your AI assistant's own ordinary use, running it unattended at a volume no individual appraiser or firm would generate by hand, or using it to build an automated pipeline, product, or service for other people. If you think you have a legitimate higher-volume use case, email us at admin@appraise-assist.com before you build around it.

11. Your files and your output stay yours

appraise-assist doesn't perform appraisals, give valuation opinions, or replace your judgment. Its calculations, adjustments, narratives, checks, and export files are drafts and aids. You review them, you decide what goes in the final report, and you're solely responsible for the appraisal, the report, and compliance with USPAP, your state license, your lender or client's requirements, and GSE/agency rules (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, VA, FHA, and the like). See Professional Responsibility & Disclaimer for the full statement of that.

12. We can suspend or end access

If you violate this policy, our Terms of Service, or the law, we can suspend or terminate your access to appraise-assist, with or without notice, at our discretion. We'll generally try to tell you why. A suspension or termination for a policy violation doesn't entitle you to a refund beyond what our Cancellation & Refund Policy page already promises.

13. Reporting abuse

If you believe someone is violating this policy, misusing appraise-assist, or has found a security issue in our service, email us at admin@appraise-assist.com. Tell us what you saw, when, and anything else that would help us look into it. We'll follow up.

14. Changes to this policy

We may update this Acceptable Use Policy from time to time, for example as the service changes or as we learn about new ways it's being misused. We'll post the updated policy here with a new "Last updated" date. Continuing to use appraise-assist after a change means you accept the updated policy.

15. Contact

Questions about this policy, or anything you'd like to report, go to admin@appraise-assist.com.