1. Purpose of the Service
The Service exists to help home cooks ("Hosts") and guests ("Guests") find each other and arrange to share a meal in exchange for non-monetary barter — an hour of help, a small handmade item, a skill exchanged. Every rule below follows from that purpose.
2. Your Responsibility for Local-Law Compliance
You are solely responsible for confirming, before you list, accept, host, or attend any meal, that what you are about to do is lawful in every jurisdiction whose law applies to you. This includes, without limitation, food-safety and cottage-food law; microenterprise-home-kitchen or home-restaurant rules; zoning, short-stay, and visitor regulations; rules of your lease, sublease, mortgage, homeowners' association, or condominium declaration; insurance terms; age-of-majority rules; and the tax treatment of barter. The availability of the Service in your region is not legal advice and is not a permission slip. If your local law forbids what you intend to do, you must not do it on the Service.
3. Prohibited Conduct and Content
You must not, and must not permit any third party using your account to, do any of the following on or through the Service. See the Prohibited Content page for additional detail.
- Money in the middle. Solicit, offer, accept, or facilitate the payment of cash, cards, bank transfers, payment apps, cryptocurrency, gift cards, tips, loyalty points, or any other monetary instrument in exchange for the meal itself. Reimbursing a Host for raw ingredients at documented cost, where openly and reasonably disclosed and permitted by your local law, is the only exception some jurisdictions allow.
- Sex, romance, or escort framing. Use the Service as a dating service or as a vector for sexual or romantic solicitation, including any meal framed as a sexual or romantic exchange.
- Drugs as currency. Offer, request, or exchange recreational drugs, controlled substances, or prescription medications in connection with a meal.
- Threats, harassment, and discrimination. Threaten, harass, stalk, intimidate, or doxx any person; post slurs or material that incites violence or hatred on the basis of any protected characteristic.
- Illegal labor. Procure or perform child labor, coerced labor, trafficked labor, or labor in exchange for a meal in a way that would violate wage-and-hour, immigration, or anti-trafficking law where you are.
- Disclosure of personal information. Share or publish another User's personal information — address, phone number, government ID, photograph, whereabouts — without their consent or before the Service has shared it as part of the normal flow.
- False or misleading representations. Misrepresent your identity, age, location, dietary disclosures, allergens present in food, hygiene certifications, or anything else material to a User's decision to attend or host a meal.
- Impersonation and multi-accounting. Impersonate any person or entity; create or operate more than one account; create an account to evade a suspension or block.
- Illegal activity. Use the Service to organize, promote, or participate in any activity that is unlawful where you, the other User, or the meal location is.
- Infringement. Post or transmit content that infringes any third party's intellectual property, publicity, or privacy rights.
- Spam and unsolicited content. Use the Service to send unsolicited messages, advertising, chain messages, or content unrelated to its purpose.
4. Allergen and Dietary Honesty
Allergen, dietary, and ingredient disclosures are safety information, not marketing. Hosts must disclose, to the best of their knowledge, every major allergen present in a meal and the realistic risk of cross-contamination from a shared kitchen. Guests with severe allergies, immune-compromising conditions, or other elevated risk must communicate them and must accept that the Service does not verify any Host's ability to accommodate them. Misrepresenting an allergen disclosure can kill someone; we treat it as a first-strike violation.
5. Technical Restrictions
You must not: (a) access the Service by any means other than the interfaces and instructions we provide; (b) scrape, spider, crawl, or otherwise harvest content from the Service without our prior written consent; (c) circumvent or attempt to circumvent any access control, rate limit, authentication mechanism, or security feature of the Service; (d) probe, scan, or test the vulnerability of the Service or any related system except through a coordinated disclosure to us; (e) reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the Service except to the extent permitted by mandatory law; (f) use the Service to develop a competing service or train a machine learning model; or (g) interfere with or disrupt the integrity or performance of the Service or the data it contains.
6. Enforcement
We may, in our sole discretion and with or without notice, investigate any suspected violation of this AUP, remove or refuse to display User Content, suspend or terminate accounts, refuse service, preserve and disclose information to law enforcement or other authorities where we are permitted or required to do so, and take any other action we consider appropriate. Where local law requires a specific notice, appeal, or transparency procedure, we follow it.
7. Reporting
To report a suspected violation, use the in-app report button on the offending User's profile or content, or write to support@barterkitchen.com. Reports are reviewed by hand. If you believe a person is in immediate physical danger, contact your local emergency services first.
8. Changes
We may modify this AUP from time to time. We will post the updated version with a new effective date and, where the change is material, will notify you in the Service or by email. Your continued use of the Service after the effective date constitutes acceptance of the updated AUP.