Know your rights

This is user education, not legal advice. HaulProfit is not your attorney. We don't know the specific facts of your account, your contract, or your state. If a load board has terminated your account, sent you a warning, or threatened you, talk to an attorney who handles trucking-industry contract disputes.

Know your rights when using HaulProfit on a load board

This is user education, not legal advice. HaulProfit wrote these pages so you understand the situation when a load board tells you "you can't use third-party tools." We are not your attorney. We don't know the specific facts of your account, your contract, or your state. If a load board has terminated your account, sent you a warning, or threatened you, and you are deciding what to do about it, talk to an attorney who handles trucking-industry contract disputes. The "Where to get real legal help" section in the push-back toolkit lists trucker advocacy organisations that can point you to one.

Status: v1.0, counsel-approved on 2026-05-08 (English baseline) by outside counsel of record (per ../runbooks/pre-engaged-counsel.md workstream 1). See README.md §"Counsel review gate" for the gate table and version-of-record register. Non-English locales remain stub scaffolding and are not approved.

The short version

A load board's terms of service can tell you a lot of things. It can't tell you to stop thinking. It can't tell you to throw away your calculator. It can't tell you which spreadsheet to use, or whether you can run a screen reader, or whether you can ask ChatGPT a question in another browser tab. There are real, settled limits on what a contract you click through can reach into.

HaulProfit is on the same side of that line as your calculator, your spreadsheet, your screen reader, and the translation tool your phone applies to a website. It runs in your browser, on your authority, on data you already loaded, and it shows the answer to you. It doesn't act on the load board, doesn't push buttons for you, doesn't fetch loads in the background, and doesn't share what you saw with anyone but you.

If a load board tells you that having a profitability calculator running in your own browser violates their terms, that is the same shape of claim as telling you that opening Excel on your second monitor violates their terms. The board may say it. They may even try to enforce it. That doesn't make it enforceable.

This article explains, in plain language, what's actually going on and what you can do about it.

Three things a load board's terms of service genuinely can do

Before we talk about what they can't do, let's be honest about what they can. Load board terms of service are real contracts. Within their actual reach, they govern:

1. How you use the load board itself. What you log in as, how often you can search, what you do with the load data the board gives you, whether you can resell that data to other companies, what you post in the board's messaging features. These are all things that happen on the board, and the board's terms govern them.
2. What you can do with the data the board hands you. Most load boards say their load data is theirs (they call it "Product Data" or similar) and that you have a limited right to use it for your own internal operating decisions — not to redistribute, sell, or build a competing data product from it. That's a legitimate restriction on what you can do with the data. (HaulProfit doesn't ask you to do any of those things, and HaulProfit's own data products are built from invoice data that factoring companies submit, not from load board content — that's a deliberate architectural choice.)
3. The remedies if you breach. They can suspend or terminate your account, sue you for actual damages they can prove, etc. Standard contract stuff.

We're not here to argue with any of that. HaulProfit is designed to fit inside this reach, not pretend it doesn't exist.

Three things a load board's terms of service genuinely cannot do

Here's where it gets interesting. There are things a contract simply cannot reach, no matter how the contract is worded.

1. They can't tell you to stop thinking.

Sounds obvious, but worth saying out loud: no contract can prohibit you from looking at a load on a screen and deciding, in your own head, that the rate is bad. Your reasoning belongs to you. Whether you do that math in your head, on paper, on a calculator, in Excel, on a whiteboard in your office, or in a chat with your spouse over dinner is your business. A "no third-party tools" clause that, taken literally, would also prohibit doing arithmetic in your head is internally inconsistent, and courts read internally inconsistent clauses narrowly.

2. They can't reach into general-purpose tools you run on your own hardware.

Excel running on your second monitor isn't bound by the load board's terms of service. Neither is the calculator app on your phone. Neither is a notebook on your kitchen table. Neither is ChatGPT in another browser tab. Neither is the spreadsheet of fuel prices you built last week. Neither is a phone call to your factor. None of these things are the load board, and the load board's terms of service govern the load board.

The same logic applies to a screen reader (JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver) reading the load board's page out loud, to Google Translate rewriting it into Spanish, to Grammarly checking your spelling in the search box, to your password manager filling in your login, to your ad blocker hiding the banner ads, and to HaulProfit calculating profit per mile from the rate and miles the board already showed you. All of those are tools that run in your browser, on your authority, on data that you already loaded onto your screen, and they all show the result to you.

This is sometimes called the "user-agent doctrine" — the idea that the browser, and the tools you choose to install into your browser, are your user-agent (your stand-in, your tool), not the website's. The website's terms govern the website. They don't govern your user-agent.

3. They can't be enforced beyond what would have been within your reasonable expectations.

When you signed up for a load board, did you understand you were agreeing not to use a screen reader? Not to use Google Translate? Not to use a password manager? Not to use Excel? Not to do arithmetic in your head?

Of course not. Nobody understands those things to be banned by signing up for a load board. Courts apply a "reasonable expectations" doctrine to broadly written terms-of-service clauses: a clause is enforceable only to the extent its application would have been within your reasonable expectations at the time you agreed. Banning your existing tools — none of which a reasonable trucker expects to be banned by signing up for a load board — is exactly the kind of overreach this doctrine narrows.

There's also "contra proferentem," which is fancy lawyer Latin for: when a contract is ambiguous, it's read against the side that wrote it. The load board wrote the terms. If their terms are ambiguous about whether your screen reader (or your spreadsheet, or your calculator, or HaulProfit) is prohibited, that ambiguity is read in your favor, not theirs.

Where HaulProfit sits on this spectrum

There's a spectrum of "tools a person might apply to information they see on a website," from completely beyond any contract's reach to legitimately within it:

HaulProfit lives in the middle row. We are deliberately not in the bottom row, and the architecture is designed so we stay out of it. Specifically:

• The HaulProfit extension runs in your browser, not on a HaulProfit server. It uses your account, not ours. It only runs on pages you navigated to.
• It does not fetch loads in the background. It does not paginate. It does not crawl. Scoring happens when you act, not on a timer. There is no "headless bot running in the cloud" hitting the load board on your behalf.
• It does not change the load board's page. The HaulProfit badge floats over the page in its own little window (technically: a closed shadow root in your browser); it does not add, remove, or rearrange anything in the page the board rendered. The same pattern your password manager uses for its autofill UI.
• It does not redistribute what you see. The HaulProfit badge is shown back to you, the same human who loaded the row. We do not aggregate load board content into any product feature for anyone else. (HaulProfit's market-data products are built from invoice data that factoring companies submit, not from load board content. That's deliberate.)
• It does not bypass authentication, paywalls, or rate limits. You log in with your own credentials. You decide what to do.

That's the same architectural pattern that screen readers, ad blockers, password managers, and translation tools use. We are deliberately in the same category as those tools.

"But the load board says I can't use third-party tools"

A load board can put almost anything in its terms of service. The question isn't whether the clause is there; the question is whether it's enforceable against you for using a tool of this kind.

There are several long-standing legal doctrines that limit overbroad clauses. Your attorney can apply them to your specific situation. In plain language:

• Unconscionability. A clause that you had no real ability to negotiate (a take-it-or-leave-it click-through), and that would produce an unreasonable result if applied literally (banning your spreadsheet, your screen reader, your calculator, your translator), can be unenforceable. Both pieces have to be true, and load board click-throughs satisfy the first piece on their face.
• Public policy. Clauses that conflict with established public policy — the right to use assistive technology, the right to use general-purpose computing tools, your interest as a trucker in evaluating whether a load is profitable enough to take — are unenforceable to the extent of the conflict.
• Right to read / right of personal use. You have a long- recognised right to read information that has been delivered to you, to make personal use of it, and to apply your own faculties (and the tools you chose to install) to understanding it.
• Reasonable expectations. A clause is enforceable only to the extent its application would have been within your reasonable expectations when you agreed. A trucker signing up for a load board doesn't reasonably expect to be banned from using Excel, a calculator, a screen reader, or a profitability tool.
• Contra proferentem. Ambiguity in the contract is read against the side that wrote it (the board), not in their favor.

These doctrines are real, and they matter. They are also defenses that have to be raised — typically in an arbitration or a lawsuit, after the board has already terminated an account. That's the asymmetry: the board can act first, and your remedy comes later.

That's why what you do now, in the day-to-day, matters even if the clause turns out to be unenforceable. It's also why organised, visible pushback at the user-community level matters — the more truckers who say "wait, this is the same as banning Excel," the harder it gets for any single board to keep enforcing the clause quietly.

The honest residual

We have to be honest with you about three things.

1. A load board can terminate your account whether or not the clause is enforceable. Your remedy is to push back (see the toolkit), to appeal, to switch boards, or, if the situation warrants it, to talk to an attorney about challenging the termination. None of those options is free.
2. HaulProfit can't promise your account will be reinstated. That is the board's decision, and we don't have standing to demand it. What we can do is help you put the best version of your case in front of the board (see if your account was suspended), provide a written statement describing what HaulProfit's software actually does and does not do (see the per-incident extension-did-and-did-not-do.md template), and offer refund or service credit per the terminated-user policy.
3. The user-agent argument is strong, but it has not been definitively litigated for browser extensions on commercial SaaS the way it has for screen readers under the ADA. It is a defense to be asserted, not a precedent to rely on. Outside counsel — yours or HaulProfit's — has the final word on whether and how to assert it in any specific case.

What you can do

• Read if your account was suspended if you have already received a warning or termination email. It walks through the immediate steps, calmly.
• Read the push-back toolkit if you want to appeal, or if you want to organise with other truckers to push back at the community level.
• Contact HaulProfit support at the address in your account. We track every report of board action against a user, we offer refund or credit per the terminated-user policy, and we can give you the written statement describing what the extension does and does not do.
• Talk to a real attorney if the situation warrants it. The toolkit lists trucker advocacy organisations (OOIDA, etc.) that can help you find one who handles trucking-industry contract disputes.

About this article

HaulProfit publishes this article as user education and community- organising material. It is not legal advice, it is not a substitute for legal advice, and it does not create an attorney-client relationship between you and HaulProfit or anyone at HaulProfit.

Contract law is fact-specific. The doctrines this article describes (unconscionability, public policy, right-to-read, reasonable expectations, contra proferentem) are real and long-standing, but how a court would apply any of them to your specific situation depends on the actual contract you accepted, the actual conduct that triggered the action against your account, the law of your state, and many other facts a general article cannot account for.

What this article can do is explain the situation in plain language, point out questions worth asking, and tell you where to go for help. What it cannot do is tell you what to do in your specific case.

If you want to push back on a load board's action against your account, the push-back toolkit gives you a place to start. If you want help applying any of this to your specific situation, talk to an attorney who handles trucking- industry contract disputes — the toolkit links to advocacy organisations (OOIDA, etc.) that can help you find one.