FAIR USE POLICY

General Fair Use, Anti-Abuse and Resource-Protection Policy

Effective Date: August 2026

Provider: DigitalFreedom A brand of DigitalFreedom Global LLC 30 N Gould St, Ste N Sheridan, WY 82801 United States Contact: hello@digitalfreedom.co.za Website: https://digitalfreedom.co.za

1. PURPOSE AND SCOPE

1.1 Purpose

This Fair Use Policy (“FUP” or “Policy”) sets out how DigitalFreedom (operated by DigitalFreedom Global LLC — collectively “the Provider”) determines whether your use of the Services is consistent with normal, intended, individual end-user use, and the actions the Provider may take where use exceeds those expectations or where misuse is suspected.

The Policy exists to protect:

the reliability, performance and availability of the Services for all users,
the integrity and security of the Provider’s infrastructure and sub-processors,
the commercial sustainability of free, fixed-price, flat-rate and subscription offerings,
and the rights of third parties whose data or systems could be affected by abusive use.

1.2 Scope

This Policy applies to all Services provided under the DigitalFreedom brand (operating legal entity: DigitalFreedom Global LLC), including websites, mobile and desktop applications, APIs, account-based features, and any free, trial, paid or subscription tier — regardless of distribution channel (Apple App Store, Google Play, direct distribution, web).

It applies globally — wherever the Services are made available, including in every country and territory served by the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. The Provider adopts the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and related EU law as its baseline standard and applies it as a global floor; other applicable laws are respected and applied additionally, with the more protective standard prevailing wherever they overlap.

It applies in addition to, and supplements, the Provider’s:

In the event of conflict, the order of precedence in the Legal Framework Overview applies. Mandatory consumer-protection law of your place of habitual residence remains unaffected and prevails over everything in that order.

2. WHAT “FAIR USE” MEANS

2.1 General Principle

“Fair use” means use of the Services in a manner that is:

consistent with the intended purpose and reasonable expectations of an ordinary individual end user,
proportionate in volume, frequency and intensity to that purpose,
non-disruptive to other users, the Services, the Provider’s infrastructure and the Provider’s sub-processors, and
lawful and in compliance with the Acceptable Use Policy.

The Provider does not publish fixed numerical thresholds for every Service. Where a specific Service publishes quotas, rate limits, or quantitative fair-use thresholds (e.g. in the in-app documentation, API documentation, plan description, or order form), those quantitative limits supplement this Policy without restricting the Provider’s broader rights under it.

2.2 Indicators of Use Beyond Fair Use

The following non-exhaustive list of patterns may indicate that use exceeds normal individual end-user use:

Volume / rate — request rates, data volumes, storage footprint, compute consumption, message counts or session counts that materially exceed those generated by typical individual use of the same Service
Continuous / unattended operation — sustained 24/7 activity, automated polling, scraping, crawling or other unattended patterns inconsistent with human interaction
Concentration of activity — short bursts of disproportionate load, atypical concurrency or parallelism, or sustained activity around platform rate caps
Resale, sharing, or multi-tenant use of an individual account — sharing credentials, reselling access, fronting the Service for third parties, or operating the Service for the benefit of an audience larger than the account holder
Workload mischaracterisation — using a free, trial, personal, or low-tier plan for what is in substance commercial, organisational, or production use
Account multiplication / evasion — creation of multiple accounts, use of disposable email addresses, IP rotation, device-identifier rotation, or other techniques apparently intended to circumvent limits, suspensions, billing or anti-abuse controls
Infrastructure abuse — using the Services as a relay, proxy, anonymisation layer, CDN origin, file-distribution platform, mining facility, or load generator targeted at third parties
Data-export disproportion — bulk exports, backups or syncs of data that are inconsistent with the user’s own consumption needs

The Provider may also take into account qualitative context — including the user’s plan, the Service’s intended purpose, prior conduct, complaints from other users, and the impact on infrastructure and sub-processors.

3. TRIGGERS FOR RESTRICTION

The Provider may exercise the rights in Section 4 in any of the following circumstances:

3.1 Observed Excess

Use that the Provider, acting reasonably and in good faith, considers to exceed fair use as described in Section 2.

3.2 Suspected Misuse

A good-faith suspicion — based on observed patterns, telemetry, third-party reports, security signals, sub-processor notifications or other indicators available to the Provider — that the Services are being used:

in breach of this Policy, the Acceptable Use Policy, the Terms of Service, the EULA, or applicable law,
to harm or attempt to harm the Services, the Provider, sub-processors, other users, or third parties,
in a manner that creates legal, regulatory, reputational or security risk for the Provider or its sub-processors.

The Provider is not required to obtain conclusive proof of misuse before acting. A reasonable, good-faith suspicion based on the information available at the time is sufficient to trigger the rights in Section 4, subject to the safeguards in Section 5.

3.3 Infrastructure or Sub-processor Risk

Any situation in which the user’s activity:

threatens the availability, performance, security or integrity of the Services or shared infrastructure,
triggers throttling, rate-limiting, suspension, breach-notification or abuse-handling procedures at a sub-processor,
generates cost, complaint volume or regulatory exposure disproportionate to the user’s plan or fee.

3.4 Legal or Regulatory Requirement

Any binding legal order, court order, regulatory direction or law-enforcement request that requires the Provider to restrict, suspend or terminate the user’s access.

4. PROVIDER RIGHTS AND RESPONSES

Where a trigger under Section 3 is present, the Provider may take one or more of the following measures, applied in good faith and proportionate to the situation:

4.1 Soft Measures (Non-disruptive)

Issuing a notice, warning or request for information
Requesting the user to migrate to a more appropriate plan
Setting or adjusting quotas, rate limits or quotas-per-time-window
Applying soft caps with graceful degradation
Requiring identity, address, payment-method, or eligibility verification

4.2 Restrictive Measures

Throttling request rates, bandwidth, compute or message rates
Rate-limiting at API, account, IP, device or session level
Reducing storage quotas, retention periods, or feature quotas
Restricting features (read-only mode, removal of bulk-export, removal of API access, removal of background-task entitlement, removal of premium features)
Blocking specific request patterns, endpoints, IPs, devices, or integrations
Charging for resource consumption that exceeds the fair-use envelope of the user’s plan, where the user’s plan or applicable law permits such a charge

4.3 Suspensive Measures

Temporary suspension of part or all of the user’s access
Quarantine of the user’s account, content or workloads
Suspension of API tokens, credentials, integrations or webhooks

4.4 Terminal Measures

Termination of the user’s account or specific subscription
Refusal to re-create accounts or to provide future Services
Reporting to law enforcement, regulators, or affected third parties

4.5 Proportionality

The Provider will seek to apply the least disruptive measure sufficient to address the situation, and to escalate only where necessary or where prior measures have not resolved the issue. Severe, ongoing or criminal conduct may warrant immediate terminal measures.

5. NOTICE, APPEAL AND DUE PROCESS

5.1 Notice (where practicable)

Where practicable, the Provider will:

notify the user of the measure taken (or to be taken),
describe the conduct or pattern that triggered the measure,
specify what the user must do to remedy the situation (if anything),
specify how to appeal under Section 5.3.

5.2 Emergency / No-notice Action

The Provider may take any of the measures in Section 4 without prior notice where prior notice would be impractical or counterproductive, including:

imminent or ongoing risk of harm to the Services, infrastructure, sub-processors, other users or third parties,
security incidents, suspected unauthorised access, suspected account takeover or credential compromise,
legal or regulatory orders that require immediate action,
conduct that is, on its face, manifestly unlawful (e.g. content prohibited under the AUP § 3.2),
evasion or anti-detection conduct (multiple accounts, rotation, automation specifically targeting controls).

Notice will be given as soon as it becomes practicable.

5.3 Appeal and Internal Review

A user affected by a measure under this Policy may request internal review by writing to hello@digitalfreedom.co.za within 30 days of receiving notice (or, where no notice was given, within 30 days of becoming aware of the measure).

The request should include the affected account identifier, the date of the measure, a description of the user’s view of the underlying conduct, and any supporting information.

The Provider will acknowledge the request and complete the review within a reasonable period. The Provider may maintain the measure in force during the review where the underlying trigger persists.

5.4 Statutory Rights Preserved

Nothing in this Section 5 limits any mandatory statutory right the user may have under applicable consumer-protection or data-protection law, including but not limited to:

the right of EU and EEA consumers to challenge measures under the Consumer Rights Directive, the Digital Services Act and national implementing law,
the right to lodge a complaint with a data-protection supervisory authority in respect of any personal-data processing involved in the measure.

6. MONITORING AND DETECTION

6.1 Operational Telemetry

To operate the Services securely and to apply this Policy, the Provider processes operational telemetry — including request metadata, rate counters, error rates, resource consumption, security signals and aggregate usage patterns.

6.2 Anomaly Detection

The Provider may use automated detection (including statistical baselines and rule-based detection) to identify patterns indicative of use beyond fair use or of misuse. Automated detection informs human review; no automated decision under this Policy produces legal effects on the user without human involvement, except where strictly necessary to mitigate an immediate threat (in which case the user retains the appeal rights under Section 5.3).

6.3 Privacy of Monitoring

All monitoring is carried out in accordance with the Privacy Policy, Art. 6 GDPR (legitimate interest in the security, integrity and abuse prevention of the Services per Recital 49) and, where applicable, Art. 32 GDPR. Monitoring is limited to what is necessary, proportionate, and consistent with data-minimisation principles.

7. RELATIONSHIP TO OTHER POLICIES

This Policy supplements and is read together with:

the Terms of Service (Sections 2.2 — Modifications, 3.3 — Suspension, 12 — Termination),
the Acceptable Use Policy (in particular Section 3.6 — Network and Resource Abuse, and Section 5 — Enforcement),
the EULA,
the Privacy Policy and any applicable Data Processing Agreement.

Where another policy contains a more specific or more restrictive provision on the same subject matter, that more specific or more restrictive provision applies.

8. REGIONAL PROVISIONS

8.1 European Union / EEA

Mandatory consumer-protection rights remain unaffected.
Where the user has prepaid for a Service and the Provider terminates or materially restricts the Service for reasons not attributable to the user, the user retains any statutory right to a pro-rata refund or proportionate remedy under the Consumer Rights Directive (2011/83/EU) and the Digital Content Directive ((EU) 2019/770), where applicable.

8.2 Germany

This Policy is read consistently with §§ 305 ff. BGB. The Provider’s rights to throttle, restrict, suspend or terminate are exercised reasonably and in good faith (§ 242 BGB).
The Provider’s right to terminate for cause without notice (außerordentliche Kündigung) under § 314 BGB remains unaffected.
Statutory liability for intent and gross negligence (§ 276 BGB) cannot be excluded.

8.3 United Kingdom

Consumer Rights Act 2015 protections apply where the user contracts as a consumer.
Restrictions exercised under this Policy are subject to the requirement that contract terms be fair under Part 2 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015.

8.4 United States

Restrictions are exercised consistently with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, applicable state consumer-protection law, and any applicable platform terms.
For California residents, restrictions involving Personal Information are exercised consistently with the CCPA / CPRA.

8.5 Other Jurisdictions

The Provider exercises the rights under this Policy consistently with applicable consumer-protection, contract and data-protection law in all jurisdictions where the Services are offered. Where local mandatory law restricts any provision of this Policy, that provision applies only to the extent permitted.

9. CHANGES TO THIS POLICY

The Provider may update this Fair Use Policy from time to time. Material changes will be communicated where practicable. The “Effective Date” at the top reflects the latest revision. Continued use of the Services after a change constitutes acceptance of the updated Policy.

10. CONTACT

For questions, notices, or appeals relating to this Fair Use Policy:

DigitalFreedom A brand of DigitalFreedom Global LLC 30 N Gould St, Ste N Sheridan, WY 82801 United States

General / appeals: hello@digitalfreedom.co.za Customer support: support@digitalfreedom.co.za Data protection: data-protection@digitalfreedom.co.za Website: https://digitalfreedom.co.za