Check your suppliers' terms every month

Every tool that posts, sends, charges, or scrapes for you works inside someone else's rules. ZeroCrew sees founders run whole companies on stacks of these suppliers, and each supplier touches a platform with its own terms. A posting tool lives under Reddit's rules, a checkout lives under Stripe's, and an app lives under Apple's. When a supplier crosses a line, the platform acts on the account it sees, and that account is yours.

Losing an account can arrive with little warning. Reddit's User Agreement (effective July 1, 2026) says Reddit may suspend or terminate an account at any time, including for breaking its terms or the Reddit Rules. ZeroCrew's answer to this risk is a monthly check by an AI agent that reads every supplier's terms and the rules of the platforms they touch, so a problem has a better chance of showing up in a report before it reaches your account.

The monthly terms check gives you one short report: which tools you use, which platform rules they touch, what changed since last month, and what to do. ZeroCrew built this use case around Claude Code, Anthropic's agent, because its cloud scheduled tasks run a saved prompt on a schedule while your laptop is closed. Below are the steps, the tools, and the prompt.

Why is checking terms of service by hand so hard?

Checking terms by hand is hard because the rules sit on many pages, and each page changes on its own clock. ZeroCrew opened five policy pages from four platforms in October 2026 and found five revision dates in five months.

The five revision dates ZeroCrew found in October 2026 show how often platform rules move: Reddit's User Agreement on May 26, Reddit's Data API Terms on July 20, Google's spam policies on August 28, Stripe's prohibited businesses list on September 22, and Apple's App Review Guidelines on October 16, 2026.

A changed policy doesn't always reach your inbox. Reddit's User Agreement (effective July 1, 2026) says Reddit posts revised terms and updates the effective date, and, under its general terms, may email users when Reddit considers a change material. Reddit's Data API Terms (last revised July 20, 2026) add that using the API after a revision means you accept it. ZeroCrew reads those two clauses as a reason to look every month, because continued use counts as agreement.

The hardest risk to see is the one a supplier creates for you. Apple's App Review Guidelines (last updated October 16, 2026) say you are responsible for making sure everything in your app complies, including ad networks, analytics services, and third-party SDKs. ZeroCrew sees the same shape across the platforms in this check: the account holder carries the risk for every tool plugged into the account, so a supplier's shortcut becomes your problem.

A handful of platform rules come up again and again when ZeroCrew reads the terms behind common founder tools. Each rule below comes from the platform's own page, opened in October 2026:

• Reddit's User Agreement bars using Reddit in any way, automated or not, including through bots, that could disrupt or overburden it, and bars collecting data from Reddit except as its terms or a separate agreement allow.
• Reddit's Data API Terms bar using the API to spam, incentivize, or harass users.
• Google's spam policies describe scaled content abuse as many pages generated mainly to manipulate rankings, no matter how they're made, and say sites that break the policies may rank lower or not appear at all.
• Apple's guidelines say that manipulating reviews or chart rankings, including through third-party services acting for you, can lead to removal from the Apple Developer Program.
• Stripe's list names the industries that can't use Stripe and says you must stay compliant with those rules to use Stripe's services.

How does an automated terms of service check work?

An automated terms check is one agent run with one job: read, compare, and report. ZeroCrew's version runs as a Claude Code cloud scheduled task, which Anthropic's docs describe as a saved prompt, repositories, and connectors that run on Anthropic-managed cloud infrastructure.

A Claude Code cloud scheduled task keeps working when your laptop is closed, so ZeroCrew's monthly terms check happens on its date whether you remember it or not, and every run reads the same list of suppliers and platforms in the same order.

Each run follows the same four steps, which ZeroCrew wrote into the prompt on this page:

1. Read your list of tools, then open each tool's terms of service and acceptable use policy.
2. Open the rules of the platforms those tools touch, such as Reddit, X, Google, Stripe, and the App Store.
3. Compare each page with the copy saved last month, and note what changed.
4. Write a report that lists each risk with a link to the clause and a next step, then save fresh copies for next month.

The report lands in a place you already check. ZeroCrew suggests saving the report and the page copies in a small private repository, because a cloud scheduled task starts each run from a fresh clone, and the saved copies become next month's baseline. Anthropic's docs say a task can also use connectors such as Slack, so if you've connected Slack at claude.ai, the agent can post the summary where you work.

Which tools do you need for a monthly terms check?

A monthly terms check needs one agent that reads and writes, a repository to remember last month, and an optional scraper for pages that are hard to read. ZeroCrew lists the agent and the scraper in its directory, and the table below shows what each tool does in this chain and which ZeroCrew page ranks its alternatives.

Step	Tool	What it does here	Alternatives on ZeroCrew
Read, compare, and report	Claude Code	Runs the monthly prompt as a cloud scheduled task and writes the report	AI coding agents
Read long or script-heavy pages	Firecrawl	Turns web pages into clean text the agent can compare, through its MCP server	Search and scraping APIs

Claude Code does the reading, comparing, and writing in the monthly terms check. ZeroCrew's Claude Code page describes Anthropic's agent running in the terminal, in VS Code and JetBrains, in a desktop app, and in the browser, and using your other tools once you connect MCP servers. For this check, the cloud scheduled tasks matter most: according to Anthropic's docs (October 2026), scheduled tasks are available on the Pro, Max, Ultra, Team, and Enterprise plans.

The cost of the check is the Claude plan behind it. According to Anthropic's pricing page (as of October 2026), Claude Pro costs $20 a month billed monthly, or $17 a month with annual billing, and includes Claude Code. ZeroCrew notes one detail from Anthropic's scheduled task docs: every scheduled run counts against your account's usage and limits, so a long tool list uses more of your plan than a short one.

Firecrawl helps when a policy page is long or built with scripts. ZeroCrew's Firecrawl page describes a tool that scrapes pages into Markdown, monitors pages for changes, and has an MCP server your agent can call. Some sites block automated readers, so ZeroCrew's setup asks the report to list any page the agent couldn't open, and you read those pages yourself.

Once a month, check the terms of service for these tools: {your list}.
Also check the platforms they touch, like Reddit, X, Google, Stripe, and the App Store.
Tell me if anything I use breaks another platform's rules or changed since last month.
List each risk with a link to the clause and what I should do.

Paste the prompt below into a new Claude Code scheduled task, from the web or with /schedule in the CLI, and replace the placeholder with every tool that posts, sends, charges, scrapes, or signs in for you. ZeroCrew kept the prompt short on purpose, so you can add your own platforms to its second line as your stack grows.

How do you set up a monthly terms check in Claude Code?

Setting up the monthly terms check takes seven steps, and ZeroCrew wrote each one from Anthropic's Claude Code docs for cloud scheduled tasks, opened in October 2026. Anthropic marks scheduled tasks as a research preview whose behavior and limits may change, so if a screen looks different from these steps, the docs have the current version.

1. Write down every supplier: each tool that posts for you, sends email, takes payments, scrapes data, or signs in to another platform with your account.
2. Create a small private GitHub repository for the report and the saved copies of each terms page, and give the task GitHub access to it.
3. Create the scheduled task from Claude Code on the web, from the Desktop app, or with /schedule in the CLI, and pick that repository.
4. In Advanced settings, open the task's cloud environment and set Network access to Custom with the domains of every policy page on your list, or to Full. Anthropic's docs say the Default environment allows only a short list of developer domains, so other pages fail to load. Connectors such as Firecrawl's MCP server reach their services through Anthropic's servers and need no change.
5. Paste the prompt, fill in your tool list, and add one line naming the branch to save to. Claude pushes to a branch that starts with claude/ unless the prompt says otherwise, and next month's run needs to find the copies.
6. Set a monthly schedule. No preset runs monthly, so create the task, then open its edit dialog (or run /schedule update in the CLI), select Custom, and enter a cron expression for one day a month. A plain five-field expression runs in UTC, and a time a few minutes past the hour starts closer to schedule.
7. Run the task once now, and read the first report before the first scheduled date.

What should you check before you trust the report?

Trust the terms report after the first run passes a few checks. ZeroCrew treats an agent's reading of legal terms as a first pass, not legal advice: the agent finds the clause and the change, and you decide what it means.

For anything that could cost you an account, a payout, or an app listing, ZeroCrew suggests a lawyer's read of the flagged clause, because an agent's summary of legal terms is a starting point, and a lawyer can tell you what the clause means for your own business.

On the first run, ZeroCrew suggests checking these points before you leave the task on its own:

• Every link opens the clause the report quotes, on the platform's own site.
• Every date in the report matches the "last revised" or "last updated" line on the page.
• Pages the agent couldn't open (often a network setting, see step 4) appear as a list, never as a guess.
• The saved copies landed on the branch you named, so next month has a baseline.

A useful report is short and specific. ZeroCrew's prompt asks for each risk with a link and an action, so a quiet month should read as a brief list of tools with no change found. If the first report runs long or vague, trim the tool list and run the task again before you trust it every month.

How does ZeroCrew help you choose safer suppliers?

The result you want is a stack where every tool is worth its risk, and ZeroCrew helps you choose that stack. Each ZeroCrew job page lists the tools for one job, so when the monthly report flags a supplier, you can compare the alternatives.

ZeroCrew's job pages rank tools in more than one way: the AI coding agents page, for example, ranks Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and others three ways, including by what founders say they use, so you can see which replacement other founders run before you switch a flagged supplier.

Your agent can compare ZeroCrew's alternatives for a flagged supplier on its own. ZeroCrew's public MCP server at https://zerocrew.ai/api/mcp/public has tools to search the directory, read a tool's page, list roles, and list the tools for a job. Add the address to Claude, Cursor, or ChatGPT as a custom connector, and the monthly task can suggest a replacement for any supplier it flags. ZeroCrew's MCP servers list shows every listed tool with its own MCP server.

If you'd rather hand the whole stack to someone, ZeroCrew's AI agent setup picks the tools, sets them up, and keeps them running, with a reply within one business day. ZeroCrew checks each listing in its directory, which gives you a sound starting list for the suppliers your monthly check will read.