CardBndr

Legal & Project Ethics

CardBndr's fan content status, Fair Use commitment, Good Citizen API policy, data handling practices, and donation transparency.

This page sets out everything you should know about CardBndr’s legal standing, how it uses external data, and the values that guide how it is built and operated.

Fan Content & Unofficial Status

CardBndr is unofficial Fan Content produced under applicable Fan Content Policies.

CardBndr is not produced by, endorsed by, supported by, or affiliated with Wizards of the Coast, any Magic: The Gathering publisher, any trading card game manufacturer, or any card data or market price provider. All trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

References to card names, set names, rules text, and card imagery are made solely for the purpose of helping individual collectors identify and organise cards they personally own.

Fair Use & Data Usage

CardBndr accesses publicly available card metadata (names, mana costs, rules text, set symbols, and card imagery) via public APIs for the following purposes only:

  • Personal organisational use — helping you catalogue, search, and view cards in your own collection.
  • Educational use — displaying card rules text and metadata to help you understand your cards.
  • Personal valuation — retrieving publicly available market reference prices so you can understand the approximate value of cards you own.

No card data or imagery accessed by CardBndr is redistributed, published, sold, or used for any commercial purpose. All data retrieved from external APIs is stored locally on your device in a SQLite database and is used exclusively within the application for your personal benefit.

CardBndr does not scrape, mirror, or republish card databases. It does not aggregate or resell market pricing data.

Good Citizen API Policy

CardBndr is engineered to be a responsible consumer of the public APIs it depends on. Free data services are a shared commons, and we take our responsibility as an API consumer seriously.

Adaptive Throttling

A mandatory inter-request delay is inserted between every API call. This ensures that CardBndr never issues requests faster than the data provider’s published fair-use policy allows, regardless of how large a sync operation is.

Intelligent Backoff

When CardBndr detects connection instability (specifically, three consecutive HTTP 503 responses from an external API), it automatically pauses for a full 60 seconds before resuming. This gives the provider’s rate-limit window time to fully reset, protecting the service from sustained load.

The Intelligent Backoff behaviour is not a workaround — it is a deliberate design choice to be a polite, low-impact client. See the Price Sync Troubleshooting guide for full technical detail.

Human-Browsing Endpoints

CardBndr does not use automated tools to scrape web pages designed for human browsing. Bulk price updates are limited to API endpoints where permitted. Secondary market price lookups via non-API methods are restricted to individual, per-card requests initiated manually by the user, and are never automated or batched.

Data Handling & Privacy

CardBndr collects no personal data. There are no analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting, and no network calls made without your direct action (such as triggering a price sync).

All data persisted by CardBndr lives in a single SQLite database file on your local machine. You can:

  • Back it up by copying the file.
  • Inspect it with any SQLite viewer.
  • Delete it to completely remove all CardBndr data from your system.

CardBndr does not require — and has no mechanism to create — a user account of any kind.

Non-Commercial Nature

CardBndr is free software. There are no ads, no subscriptions, no premium feature tiers, and no monetisation of any kind built into the application itself. This is a deliberate commitment, not a temporary choice.

The project is sustained entirely by optional community donations (see below). No venture capital, no external funding, no commercial partnerships.

Donations

Donations to Crooked Parrot via PayPal are entirely voluntary. They are not a payment for the software, for a service, or for any future feature. They carry no guarantee of continued development, priority support, or any other benefit.

All donated funds are used exclusively to cover:

  • Web hosting and domain registration.
  • Development tooling and infrastructure.
  • API access costs.
  • And perhaps a coffee or a booster pack for the collection.

Donations are non-refundable and are not a payment for software or guaranteed future features.

No Warranty

CardBndr is provided as is, without warranty of any kind, express or implied. The developers make no representations about the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose of the application or the data it retrieves.

Market price data is sourced from third-party public APIs and may be incomplete, delayed, or incorrect. It is provided for reference purposes only and should not be used as the sole basis for any financial decision.