Terms

Use SpecHawk to research and pick parts. Don't scrape us, don't impersonate us, and don't expect us to keep your account up if you stop signing in for a year.

This page is the long version of the same paragraph. By using SpecHawk you agree to the rules below. If you don't, the site has a sign-out button.

Acceptable use

SpecHawk is a research and build-planning tool for PC component shopping in the United States. You can:

  • Browse parts, prices, and Daily Builds.
  • Save builds to your account and share public builds via their /b/[slug] URL.
  • Click through to retailers via our buy buttons.
  • Read the methodology, the affiliate disclosure, and the privacy policy.

You may not:

  • Scrape the site programmatically — automated requests that bypass our HTML interface, ignore our robots.txt, or impersonate a browser to harvest pricing data violate these terms. Our pricing comes from licensed retailer feeds and is not yours to redistribute.
  • Reverse-engineer our APIs to embed our pricing or compatibility data in another site or product.
  • Impersonate SpecHawk, the SpecHawk team, or another SpecHawk user.
  • Use the site to break the law in your jurisdiction or in ours (the United States).
  • Attempt to bypass authentication, access another user's saved builds, or interfere with the operation of the site.

If you want a structured-data export or an API, reach out at hello@spechawk.io. Don't scrape.

Account responsibilities

You're responsible for:

  • The accuracy of the email you sign up with. Verification emails go to that address; account recovery is gated on it.
  • Keeping your password to yourself. We don't store it in plaintext, but we also can't recover it for you — we can only reset it.
  • The builds you save. Public builds (the ones you flip from private to public) are visible at their /b/[slug] URL to anyone who has the URL.

If you stop signing in, we don't keep your account alive forever. After 12 months of inactivity we may purge inactive accounts and their saved builds with at least 30 days' notice to the email on file. If you come back inside that window, just sign in.

Pricing accuracy

We display the prices our retailer feeds report, with a timestamp showing when the source confirmed the value. We don't honor retailer typos. If a retailer briefly lists a $1,200 graphics card at $12, we are not the merchant of record and you have to take the price up with the retailer.

The freshness indicator on every price shows how recently the source confirmed the value. If a feed has gone quiet, the indicator turns amber within an hour and red after 24 hours. We don't hide stale data behind a fresh-looking timestamp.

Prices change. By the time you click a buy button, the retailer's site is the source of truth. We can't guarantee the price you see on SpecHawk is the price you'll see at checkout, but the freshness metadata on every row is the honest signal of how confident we are.

Affiliate links

When you buy through our links, we earn a small commission. Retailer ranking on SpecHawk does not see commission rates. The full disclosure lives at /affiliate-disclosure. The short-form disclosure component appears next to every buy button on the site.

Compatibility checks

The 28-check compatibility engine is best-effort. We run every saved build and every Daily Build through it before publish. The checks catch the unglamorous fits — RAM-stick height vs cooler clearance, GPU length vs case GPU bay, PSU connector inventory, M.2-and-SATA conflicts, native 12V-2x6 connectors on Performance Pick and higher tiers.

Two caveats:

  • Manufacturer specs drift. When a manufacturer updates a product spec sheet without changing the part number, our cached value can be wrong until the next refresh. The compatibility result reflects what we knew at the timestamp shown.
  • Small-form-factor case clearances are estimated, not exact. Manufacturer SFF clearance specs routinely come in ±5–10mm off real-world measurements. SFF compat results on SpecHawk are explicitly labelled "estimated" — measure your case if the margin is tight.

A green compatibility check is a confident "this should fit per the available specs", not a guarantee. Read the rationale, look at the warnings, and use your judgment on the edge cases.

Liability

SpecHawk is provided "as is". We make our best effort to keep the data accurate, the freshness honest, the compatibility checks tight, and the site available — but we can't guarantee uninterrupted service or perfect data.

We are not responsible for purchases you make at retailers we link to. The retailer is the merchant of record. Returns, refunds, warranty service, shipping, sales tax, and damaged-in-transit claims are between you and the retailer.

We are not responsible for damage caused by parts you bought after researching them on SpecHawk. The compatibility engine reduces the odds of a mismatch, but final responsibility for the build sits with the person assembling it. If you ordered a 12V-2x6-required GPU and an adapter-only PSU because you ignored the warning, that's a "you" problem, not a "we missed it" problem.

To the extent permitted by law, our total liability for any claim arising from your use of SpecHawk is limited to the amount of affiliate commission we earned from purchases you made through SpecHawk in the 12 months before the claim.

Changes to these terms

If we change the terms in a way that materially affects what you can do or what we promise, we update this page and flag the change at the top for at least 30 days.

Questions: hello@spechawk.io.