Terms of Service

By using Home Theater Builder, you agree to these terms. If you don’t agree, please don’t use the site.

What this site is

Home Theater Builder is a free tool for planning a home theater system: a product catalog with sourced specifications, a compatibility checker, price tracking across retailers, and editorial buying guides. Every part of it works without an account; an account is optional, and what it adds is set out under “Your account” below. We are not a retailer. We do not sell, ship, or warranty any product. Every purchase you make happens on a third-party retailer’s own site, under their own terms.

The data, and its limits

We source every specification from official spec sheets, manuals, and other public sources, and we record measurement context alongside each value so it isn’t compared out of context. Where a manufacturer does not publish a value, we mark it as unstated rather than guess. Even so, specifications, prices, and availability change, and errors happen. Nothing on this site is a substitute for confirming critical specs, current pricing, and stock directly with the manufacturer or retailer before you buy. The compatibility checker’s findings are informational, not professional installation, electrical, or safety advice.

The site, its data, and its tools are provided as is, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including fitness for a particular purpose. To the fullest extent permitted by law, Home Theater Builder is not liable for any purchase decision, loss, or damage arising from your use of the site or reliance on its data.

Affiliate links

Some outbound links to retailers may be affiliate links: where an affiliate relationship exists, we may earn a commission on qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you. This never changes which products are shown, how they rank, or what a compatibility check reports. See our Privacy Policy for more detail.

Saved builds

A build saved while signed out is stored against an anonymous browser cookie, not against an identity, so anyone using your device can see it. A build saved while signed in is stored against your account as well. Either way, a build’s share link is a key: anyone who has it can view the build, so treat it the way you would any link you don’t want strangers to have. You can delete a saved build at any time from the Saved page.

Your account

An account is optional. If you make one, you are responsible for what happens under it and for keeping your sign-in details to yourself, and you agree to give us an email address you actually control. What we store, and what we do with it, is set out in our Privacy Policy.

Your handle and display name are visible to us and, when a feature shows them, to other people. So:

• Don’t impersonate anyone — another person, a brand, a retailer, or this site and its staff — or pick a handle or display name meant to be read as official.
• Don’t use a handle or display name that is unlawful, hateful, or harassing, or that exists to advertise something.
• Don’t register handles in bulk, or hold them to resell them.

You can delete your account yourself, at any time, from Settings: choose Delete account and it removes your builds, your profile, and your sign-in method. It is immediate and it cannot be undone, so export your data first if you want a copy. We may suspend or terminate an account that breaches these terms, or reclaim a handle that breaks the rules above, and we will use the address on the account to tell you when we do unless the law or an abuse investigation stops us. Ending an account, either way, does not end the parts of these terms that are meant to survive it — the disclaimers, the limits on liability, and what you may reuse.

Builds you publish

Publishing a build to Explore is optional, deliberate and per build. Publishing requires signing in. What you write stays yours: you keep every right you had in the name and description you wrote, and you give us only the permission we need to run the feature — to store, display, cache and distribute that build on this site and in link previews of its page, for as long as it is published. Unpublishing ends that permission going forward; it cannot reach copies someone else already made, and we do not claim it can. See our Privacy Policy for exactly what a published build shows.

You are responsible for what you publish, and you confirm it is yours to publish. Do not publish anything unlawful, abusive, deceptive, or impersonating a brand, a retailer or us; do not publish contact details or anything else you would not hand to a stranger; do not use a published build as advertising. A person reviews every build before it first appears, and we may decline to publish one, or remove one already published, if it does not meet our publishing guidelines. Review is a check on obvious problems, not a warranty that everything published here is accurate, safe or suitable — a community build is one person’s plan, and the limits stated under “The data, and its limits” above apply to it at least as strongly as to ours.

Once a build’s address has been public we keep that address working, sending visitors back to Explore after the build comes down, rather than letting a shared link die. Deleting a published build therefore removes it and clears what you wrote, but does not erase the record of the address. Where the address is itself the problem, we retire it outright instead.

What you may reuse

The aggregate statistics and per-brand disclosure tables of our Spec-Sheet Honesty Report — including the CSV and JSON exports — are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence: reuse, republish and remix them, commercially or not, as long as you credit Home Theater Builder with a link back. The per-product catalog is different: the individual specifications, provenance records and prices, including everything served by our catalog API, are not CC-licensed and stay under our own terms — free for individual, non-bulk use with attribution and a link back; for bulk or commercial use, get in touch first. The full grant, the exact scope and the download links live on our data and licence page, and where that page and these terms differ about reuse, that page controls.

Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• Scrape, bulk-extract, or systematically republish the catalog or compatibility data without our written permission, except as expressly licensed on our data and licence page.
• Interfere with the site’s normal operation, including automated requests at a volume that degrades service for other visitors.
• Use the site to build a competing product database by automated means.
• Misrepresent a saved build or share link as an official retailer offer, price guarantee, or purchase order.

Intellectual property

The site’s compiled catalog, compatibility rules, guides, and design are ours, except as expressly licensed on our data and licence page — nothing here narrows a licence we have granted there. Product names, brand names, and trademarks referenced on the site belong to their respective owners and are used only to identify and compare real products, not to imply endorsement.

Changes

We may update the site, these terms, or the underlying data at any time. Material changes to these terms will update the date at the top of this page. Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept the updated terms.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Texas, USA, without regard to conflict-of-law principles.

Contact

Questions about these terms: support@hometheaterbuilds.com.