Usage policy

This policy says what AEC Assistant is for, what you may not do with it, and how its usage limits work. It forms part of theTerms of service. Words defined there have the same meaning here.

1. What the Service is for

AEC Assistant is a research and drafting tool for people who work in the built environment: architects, builders, building surveyors and certifiers, engineers, planners, consultants and the people who study to join them. Use it to find, read and apply the provisions of the National Construction Code, state and territory building and planning legislation, and the standards the Code references; to gather planning information for a site; to read your own drawings, specifications and reports against the Code; and to draft the reports, checklists and proposals that work produces.

2. Your responsibility for what it tells you

Every answer cites the provisions it relied on so that you can check it. Do so before you rely on it. An answer can be wrong, incomplete or out of date, and it can misjudge which edition, amendment or jurisdiction applies to a project. The assistant is not a registered practitioner, a building surveyor, a certifier, an engineer or a lawyer, and nothing it produces is a certification, a determination, an approval or professional advice. Your judgement, your registration and your liability for the project stay with you. The same applies to the calculators: each states the edition and the tables it works from, and a result is something for you to verify, not a compliance certificate.

3. What you may not do

Do not use the Service to:

• break the law, or help anyone else to.
• infringe someone's rights: do not upload drawings, reports or other material you have no right to use, and do not upload other people's personal information beyond what a project genuinely needs.
• extract, copy or republish the National Construction Code, a standard or any other part of the corpus in bulk. The Service reproduces excerpts to answer your questions; it is not a way around a licence.
• build a competing product, a dataset or a training set from its answers.
• reach it by any means other than the application and the website: no scraping, no automated clients, no bulk querying, unless we have agreed to it in writing.
• circumvent or probe its limits or safeguards, including by trying to make the assistant reveal its instructions, ignore them, or act outside what it is designed to do.
• share an account, pass on sign-in codes, or let someone use your seat.
• present an answer or a report as though it were certified, approved or independently verified when it is not.
• generate content that is defamatory, harassing, deceptive or intended to harm.
• interfere with the Service or with other users, or place an unreasonable load on it.

4. How the usage limits work

Every plan carries an allowance of work over a rolling period. The allowance is measured on the computing cost of what you ask, not on a count of questions: a short question against the Code costs little, and a long report across a drawing set costs more. Each seat has its own allowance, and it scales with the plan. Core carries a basic allowance, Plus a higher one, Max substantially more than Plus, and Enterprise whatever the agreement says.

• The weekly window looks back over the last seven days. Work drops out of it as it ages, so the allowance is always coming back rather than resetting on a fixed day.
• A short window of a few hours may also apply, so that a burst of heavy use does not consume a week's allowance in an afternoon.

The application shows how much of the window you have used. When you reach the limit, the assistant tells you which window is full and asks you to wait. A run that is under way may stop at that point, and what it had produced is kept. Nothing is lost: the conversation is there when the window has room again. If you keep reaching the limit, a higher plan or another seat is the answer.

The allowances are set so that normal professional use rarely meets them. We may adjust them as the Service and its costs change, and we will say so on the pricing page. Where use is clearly automated or designed to defeat the limits, we may restrict the account.

5. Projects, documents and storage

The number of projects and the number of documents per project depend on the plan and are stated on thepricing page. A single document may be up to 100 MB. Documents are for the project they belong to; they are indexed so the assistant can read them, and they are not shared with anyone the project is not shared with. Please keep uploads to what the work needs.

6. Teams

A team owner is responsible for the people they invite and for how the team uses the Service. Seats are for named people, not for sharing. When someone leaves the firm, remove them; their access to shared projects ends at once and their signed-in sessions are closed.

7. Public share links

A share link publishes a snapshot of a conversation to anyone who has it, with the answer's citations. Before you create one, make sure the conversation contains nothing confidential and nothing you have no right to publish. You can revoke a link at any time, and republishing replaces the snapshot.

8. Telling us about a wrong answer

If an answer is wrong, use the thumbs-down on it, or write to us. We read every report, and reports about a specific clause, edition or jurisdiction are the most useful thing you can send us.

9. What happens if this policy is broken

Depending on what happened, we may warn you, limit the account, suspend it, or close it. Unless the breach is serious or the law prevents it, we will tell you what the problem is and give you a chance to fix it. We may also report unlawful use to the authorities where we are required to, or where people are at risk.

10. Changes

We may update this policy. Material changes are announced by email or in the Service before they take effect; the date at the top says when it was last revised.

11. Contact

Questions about this policy go tosupport@aecassistant.com.au.