Legal
EstimarkPriceBot
Estimark runs one crawler, EstimarkPriceBot. It reads published list prices from UK builders' merchant websites so that a builder signing up today has a starting figure to price a job from before they have entered any prices of their own. This page exists because our crawler identifies itself by pointing at it, and because a merchant who wants us to stop should be able to find out how in under a minute.
Last updated 20 August 2026
How to recognise it
Every request it makes carries this user agent, and it never sends any other:
EstimarkPriceBot/1.0 (+https://estimark.co.uk/bot; support@estimark.co.uk)
It does not pretend to be a web browser. If you see a browser user agent, it is not us.
How to stop it
Either of these works, and we would rather you used whichever is less trouble.
- Add a rule for EstimarkPriceBot to your robots.txt. We read robots.txt before every request, we honour Crawl-delay, and a disallowed path is not requested at all.
- Or write to support@estimark.co.uk and say so. Switching a merchant off is a single configuration change on our side and takes effect the same day. It does not wait for a software release.
What it does, and what it does not
It reads product pages for a price, and only pages a robots.txt permits. It requests one page at a time per site with a pause between requests, and it asks conditionally, so a page that has not changed since we last read it costs you a 304 rather than a page of HTML.
- It does not sign in, and it does not attempt to.
- It does not fill in forms, add anything to a basket, or place an order.
- It does not read anything behind a trade account, and it has no access to account-specific pricing.
- It does not republish or resell your prices. What we hold is a starting figure inside a builder's own price book, which is replaced as soon as that builder has their own invoices or their own price list in the system.
Why a list price is not what we tell anybody they will pay
A trade account carries its own discount and varies by branch, so a published list price systematically misprices a job. Estimark treats it as the weakest of three sources of a price, behind the builder's own merchant invoices and any price list they upload, and it stops being used for an item as soon as either of those exists. It is never presented to a builder as what they will pay.
If you would rather give us a feed
We would prefer that. A product feed or an API is better data for us and less load for you, and it removes the need for any of the above. Write to support@estimark.co.uk.