Acceptable Use Policy

The rules that apply when you use Spanwise.

Last updated: 26 August 2026.

This policy applies to everyone who uses Spanwise. It forms part of the agreement under which your organisation subscribes, and part of the licence you accept as an individual user. If you are using Spanwise on behalf of an organisation, that organisation is responsible for what you do here.

If anything here conflicts with your organisation's subscription agreement, that agreement wins. This page restates the rules; it does not add to them.

We may update this policy. Where your organisation has a subscription agreement with us, we give the notice that agreement requires before a change takes effect, except where the law or a security risk requires us to act immediately, in which case we tell you as soon as we can.

What Spanwise is for

Spanwise screens structural calculation packages submitted to a building control body and reports what it thinks may be worth looking at. It is a first-pass check that informs a qualified person's decision.

It never approves a design, and it does not find everything. It is built to stay quiet where it is not confident, so an outcome reporting no critical issues means only that Spanwise did not raise one. A suitably qualified person must review every result before any decision is taken on it, and the designer of the works keeps final responsibility for what they submitted.

Use it only for real work

Upload a document only where your organisation has a legitimate building control interest in it, and only where you are entitled to upload it. Do not upload someone else's documents out of curiosity.

Legitimate use is wider than screening a live application. Training a colleague on a past package, investigating a complaint, reviewing an appeal, and internal or external audit all count, and nothing here restricts them.

Do not upload

• Material you have no right to share with us
• Documents you know to contain health information, or other special category personal data, about an identifiable person. We cannot inspect a document before processing it, so this one depends on you. Tell us straight away if it happens by accident. We will delete the document and ask the providers listed on our sub-processors page to delete their copies, though we cannot guarantee they will do so inside their own retention period, which can be up to 30 days
• Malware, or files designed to attack or interfere with the service
• Anything unlawful

Do not misuse the service

• Do not share your login. An account belongs to one named person, though your organisation can move a named seat to a replacement person by telling us
• Do not try to reverse engineer the service, or to extract its source code, models or prompts
• Do not use Spanwise, or anything it produces, to build or train a competing product or model
• Do not access the service by automated means other than the ones we provide
• Do not resell access, or let anyone outside the organisation holding the subscription use your account. Where a building control service is shared between authorities, the organisations covered are the ones named in the subscription
• Do not publish a benchmark, comparison or performance claim about Spanwise without asking us first

None of the above stops your organisation assessing Spanwise properly. Evaluating it, including against alternatives, is legitimate and expected. And nothing here restricts a disclosure required by law, including under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 or the Environmental Information Regulations 2004, or anything said in an internal or external audit, an inquest, or a regulatory or legal proceeding.

Do not misrepresent what Spanwise said

A Spanwise report carries notices explaining what it is and what it is not. If you pass a report to anyone outside your organisation, pass it on complete and unaltered, with those notices intact. Do not remove them, do not edit around them, and do not present a Spanwise result to an applicant, a designer or anyone else as an approval, a determination or a design check. It is none of those things.

Fair use

Subscriptions carry an agreed volume. If you are heading past it we will tell you before anything changes. We may apply short-term rate limits to protect the service for everyone.

We will not suspend an account except on the grounds set out in your organisation's subscription agreement.

Security

Keep your password to yourself and tell us promptly if you think your account has been accessed by someone else.

If you find a security problem in Spanwise, please report it to us at help@spanwise.co.uk and give us a reasonable chance to fix it before making it public. This does not ask you to delay telling your own employer, your security team or a regulator; do that first if your own rules require it. We will not pursue anyone who reports a genuine problem responsibly and does not access or alter other people's data while doing so.

If this policy is broken

We would rather talk to you than switch anything off, and in most cases that is what will happen. Where use presents a security risk, or where the law requires it, we may suspend access immediately. Suspension is not the same as ending an agreement, and the terms of your organisation's subscription govern what happens next.

Getting in touch

Questions about this policy: help@spanwise.co.uk.