Acceptable use policy

• Use Porch Route for anything unlawful, fraudulent, deceptive or harassing.
• Enter information about people you have no right to hold, or infringe anyone’s intellectual property or privacy.
• Upload or transmit malware, or interfere with the service or other businesses’ use of it.
• Impersonate another business in your messages, tracking pages or account details.

Every text and email goes to your customer under your name, so these rules are yours to keep:

• No texts without consent. A phone number goes on an order only when its owner has agreed to delivery texts, and you honour every opt-out.
• No marketing through delivery notifications. Consent to order updates is not consent to promotions. Keep offers, coupons and review-with-reward asks out of the transactional channel.
• No forbidden content. Nothing carriers prohibit — including content about cannabis, firearms, adult services, gambling, or anything that requires age gating — appears in message text.
• No third-party URL shorteners or redirects in message content. Links must represent your business.
• Complete carrier registration truthfully and keep it current.

If you deliver alcohol, cannabis, prescriptions, firearms or anything else that is licensed or age-restricted, you hold the licences and carry out the identity and age checks the law requires at the door. Porch Route’s proof-of-delivery tools don’t verify age or identity, and we may restrict use for categories the carriers or our providers don’t allow.

Don’t put protected health information into Porch Route — prescription details, diagnoses or anything else covered by HIPAA — unless we have signed a business associate agreement with you. We don’t offer one today. If you have enabled Google Maps Platform, Google’s terms also bar using its services for HIPAA-regulated health information.

Drive mode shares a driver’s location only while they are running a route. Use it for delivery operations only, and comply with the employee-monitoring and notice laws where your drivers work. Don’t use Porch Route to track anyone who isn’t running a route for you.

• Stay within the documented rate limits and don’t work around them with multiple keys or accounts.
• Don’t scrape, reverse-engineer, or load- or security-test the service without our written permission.
• Found a vulnerability? Tell us through the contact page (choose “Report a security issue”). See our security page for what to include.

Texts travel through our messaging provider, addresses and maps come from OpenStreetMap-based services or Google Maps Platform, and payments run through our payment processor. Their acceptable-use terms flow down to your use of Porch Route. The subprocessors page lists who they are.

We may investigate reports, remove content, pause messaging for a business, or suspend or close an account. Where we can, we’ll tell you first and give you a chance to fix the problem. Carrier complaints about texts may require us to pause messaging immediately. To report misuse, use the contact page.