BillRobinBot

BillRobin is an Alberta electricity and natural gas bill comparison service. BillRobinBot helps us keep our plan comparisons up to date.

Our exact user agent is BillRobinBot/1.0 (+https://billrobin.com/bot).

What we read

We read only public pages that anyone can open without signing in: the plan prices, fees and terms that Alberta's energy retailers publish, and the regulated rates published by the Alberta Utilities Commission, the Utilities Consumer Advocate, the electricity and gas distributors and some municipalities.

We read the sites of these retailers:

• 68Energy
• 8760
• Abode Power
• Acorn Energy
• Activate Energy
• Adagio Energy
• Alberta Cooperative Energy (ACE)
• Alberta Utility Source
• AltaConnect
• Ascend Energy
• ATCO Energy
• Azgard Energy
• Big Energy
• Big Rock Power
• Blue Ring Utilities
• Bow Valley Power
• Bright Fire Energy
• Burst Energy
• Camrose Energy
• Choice Energy
• Direct Energy
• Easymax by ENMAX Energy Corporation
• Echo Energy
• EMPWR
• Encor by EPCOR
• Energy For Less
• Firefly Energy
• Firefly Utilities
• Flux Energy
• Foothills Energy Co-op
• Frontier Energy
• Gateway Energy
• Get Energy
• Great Canadian Utilities
• GreenAmp Utilities
• Guardian Utilities
• Headwaters Utility
• Just Energy Alberta L.P.
• Legacy Energy
• Link Energy
• Mountain View Power
• Neon Power
• Northern NRG
• Olympus Energy
• Orizon Utilities
• Park Power
• Peace Power
• Peyakoskan Energy
• PowerBill
• Prairie Power
• Q-TILITIES
• Regional Energy
• Rewards POWER
• Ridge Utilities
• Rocky Mountain Community Energy
• Shared Value Energy
• Smart Utilities
• Solarmax Power
• Solartility
• SPONSOR Energy
• Spot Power
• Strathcona Power
• Sturgeon River Utilities
• Sundance Power
• Tassa Energy
• Utilities by Kuby
• Utility Simple
• Vector Energy
• Wholesale Power
• XOOM Energy Canada
• Zeno Energy

How often, and how gently

• We visit once a day, starting at 5:15 a.m. Alberta time. A few pages that rarely change are read once a week.
• We make one request at a time to each site, at least 5 seconds apart.
• If your robots.txt sets a longer Crawl-delay, we wait that long instead.
• We ask only for what has changed. We send If-None-Match and If-Modified-Since, so an unchanged page can answer with a short 304.
• We try a request at most 3 times.
• If your site answers with a server error, we wait 30 seconds before our next request to it.
• If it answers 429, or gives a Retry-After, we stop for that visit and don't come back before that time. A 429 with no Retry-After keeps us away for at least 60 seconds.
• If it answers 401 or 403, or shows a challenge page, we stop reading your site for that day.

Where our requests come from

BillRobinBot runs from an ordinary internet connection in Alberta. It has no fixed IP addresses, so we can't publish a list of them. To confirm a visit, email us the time and the page, and we will check our records.

Our requests are signed with Web Bot Auth. Each one carries the header Signature-Agent: "https://billrobin.com" and an Ed25519 signature. Our public keys are at billrobin.com/.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory.

A few pages that need JavaScript are read with a headless browser. Those requests are not signed yet.

robots.txt

We read your robots.txt at the start of each visit.

We use your Crawl-delay if it is longer than our 5 seconds.

If it has a group for BillRobinBot, we follow that group in full.

You can also block us in robots.txt with User-agent: BillRobinBot and Disallow: /.

Rules written for all robots (User-agent: *) don't stop us reading public price pages. To stop us, name BillRobinBot or email us.

What we do with what we read

• We keep the facts: prices, fees, dates and terms, with the words they came from.
• We keep a fingerprint of each page, so we can tell when it changes.
• We use the facts to compare plans for Alberta households, and to keep a dated record of prices.
• We don't publish, sell or share copies of your pages.
• We never sign in, solve CAPTCHAs or get around blocks.

To ask us to stop

To ask us to stop collecting from your site, email hello@billrobin.com with your domain. We stop within 2 business days.

You can also write to us at: Suite 349, 9218 Ellerslie Road SW, Edmonton AB T6X 0K6.