Fair Use Policy

MatchDesk wants clubs to report every real match they need to cover. Fair use protects that promise by preventing a small number of accounts from using the service in ways that create unreasonable cost, reduce reliability for other clubs, or turn a club subscription into a bulk content service for third parties.

This Fair Use Policy forms part of the MatchDesk Terms of Service.

An Unlimited plan has no ordinary fixed report allowance for genuine match reporting by the subscribing club, academy, league, or organisation. It is not an unrestricted licence for any volume, purpose, user, or automated process.

Publishing more than 1,000 reports in a rolling 12-month period may prompt a fair-use review. This is a review point, not an automatic limit or suspension. We consider the club's size, number of teams, competition schedule, seasonal peaks, and explanation before taking action.

Normal fair use includes:

• Creating reports and social posts for genuine football fixtures covered by your organisation.
• Using MatchDesk across the teams and authorised users covered by your plan.
• Regenerating, editing, copying, publishing, and republishing content as part of a normal matchday workflow.
• Seasonal peaks, tournaments, festivals, and busy fixture periods that reflect real club activity.

• Automated, scripted, or bulk generation unrelated to genuine fixtures covered by your organisation.
• Reselling MatchDesk output or operating a content-generation service for unrelated clubs or third parties without a suitable commercial agreement.
• Sharing one account or plan with people or organisations that are not authorised users of the subscribing organisation.
• Creating duplicate or artificial reports mainly to consume capacity, test limits, avoid plan restrictions, or obtain content outside the intended football reporting service.
• Scraping, reverse engineering, security testing without written permission, or any activity that threatens service performance or other customers.

To operate plans, investigate unusual use, and resolve billing or support questions, MatchDesk records when a report is created, published, unpublished, or copied using an in-product copy control. These records may include the organisation, authorised user, report identifier, action, copied content type, and timestamp. The usage event does not store the copied report or social-post text.

A review may be prompted by the 1,000-report review point, unusually high creation or copying volume, automation signals, account sharing, or another pattern that reasonably suggests misuse. High usage alone does not prove misuse.

Where practical, we will contact the account owner, explain the concern, and allow a reasonable opportunity to provide context or correct the use. Depending on the circumstances, we may apply a temporary rate limit, ask the organisation to move to a suitable commercial arrangement, restrict the affected feature, or suspend or terminate serious or repeated misuse.

We may act immediately where necessary to protect security, service availability, other customers, or the law. Our response will be proportionate to the risk and pattern of use.

Misuse, suspension, or a decision to stop using the service does not automatically create a right to a refund. When considering any discretionary refund, we may take account of service already used and content already created, copied, or published. Nothing in this policy removes a refund, cancellation, or other right that applicable law says cannot be excluded.

We may update this policy as MatchDesk, its plans, or patterns of use change. We will not use a material change retrospectively to turn previously permitted use into a breach. Where a change materially affects customers, we will take reasonable steps to bring it to their attention.

Questions about fair use can be sent to support@matchdesk.app.