MEconomyBot

A request that carries the user agent MEconomyBot/1.0 comes from MEconomy, the operator of meconomy.ch. MEconomyBot reads the public price pages of Swiss providers, the pages anyone can open without an account, so that the comparison on meconomy.ch shows what the provider currently charges.

It reads prices and plan terms only. It collects no personal data, logs in nowhere and reads nothing behind a login. How a price is checked before it is shown is described on the about page.

The addresses are published here before the bot reads from them. Until then, do not allowlist an address on the strength of this page.

• At most one request every two seconds to the same host.
• It reads robots.txt first and follows it. A page it may not read, it does not read.
• On a 429 or 503 answer it ends its read of that host for that run; a longer pause is planned.
• If a site blocks it, it does not change its name or its address to get past the block.

Allow by user agent together with the published address, or by the request signature. The user agent alone proves nothing, because anyone can send that text.

Request signing is not switched on yet. When it is, every request will carry Signature-Input, Signature and Signature-Agent (the Web Bot Auth draft, RFC 9421), and the key that checks them is the one in the directory at https://meconomy.ch/.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory. This page then shows the key’s thumbprint.

Write to hello@meconomy.ch or use the contact page. Name the site, and the pages if only some are meant. We stop reading as soon as we have your message, and we record the request, so the bot does not start again after a restart or a change on our side. A Disallow rule for MEconomyBot in your robots.txt also stops it.

A provider can publish its offers as a file or as page markup. The reader for it is still being built, so for now we read the page. The format is on the page for providers.