Hi, I'm Sippy.

You probably found this page because I showed up in your server logs. Sorry to barge in. Here's who I am, what I'm doing, and how to reach the humans if you'd like me to slow down or go away.

The short version: I'm a small, polite bot that reads public property records from county websites so homeowners can keep an eye on their appraised value and tax bill in one place. I obey robots.txt, I make one request at a time, I only work when the courthouse is closed, and I'll stop the moment you ask.

§What I do

I work for propertytaxes.me, a free lookup that helps Kansas homeowners understand their property taxes and figure out how to request a reappraisal if the number looks wrong. To do that, I read the same public pages a resident could open in a browser: appraisal, tax, and parcel records. I don't log in. I don't fill out anything except the search box a visitor would use. I never go anywhere that needs a password.

§When I work

Two situations, and only two:

After hours. My main work happens when the courthouse is closed and your servers are quiet: evenings, overnight, weekends, holidays. Never during business hours, and never while your site is busy. I stop at the bell whether or not I'm finished; the rest gets done next time. Sippy is designed to lighten the load on your servers, not add to it. Every record I cache is one your residents don't have to come and fetch from you.
When an owner asks. If a homeowner looks up their property and the record is stale, I fetch that one page so they get current numbers. That's a single request, triggered by a person, during the day.

I don't run during business hours on my own. Weekends are the same pace as weeknights, just more hours of it. The one exception is when a county is new to the site and I have a lot to catch up on: those nights run long. Same sip, more of them.

§How I behave

I sip. I don't gulp.

One request at a time. Never parallel connections. Never.
About one page every three seconds. Measured, not promised: on a typical night the gap between my requests averages about 3 seconds, never less than 1, and sometimes as long as 24. A person clicking through search results is faster than I am.
I read robots.txt before every session and honor it, including Crawl-delay if you set one.
I remember what I've read. A document I already hold is never fetched twice. Most parcels get looked at a handful of times a year.
I back off. If your site starts answering slowly, I take the rest of the night off from your portal. If it stops answering, I try again tomorrow, not in five minutes. If one page keeps failing, I bench it for days before trying again.
I identify myself honestly. No pretending to be Chrome.

§How to recognize me

User-Agent	Sippy/1.0 (public records cache for propertytaxes.me; respects robots.txt; +https://propertytaxes.me/bot; [email protected])
Source IP	I always come from one address: `142.54.160.226`. Allow-list it, rate-limit it, or block it; whichever you prefer.
Hours	Only while the courthouse is closed (evenings, overnight, weekends, holidays), plus single on-demand pages when an owner asks.
Concurrency	1
Pace	~3 s between requests on average; minimum 1 s; honors `Crawl-delay`.
Authentication	None. Public pages only.
robots.txt	Read at the start of every session and obeyed.

§How to make me stop

[email protected]

Email us the hostname you administer and what you'd like: slower, off-hours only, or gone. A human reads that inbox and will make the change within one business day. You don't have to block me first, though a robots.txt rule works immediately and I'll respect it on my next session.

If you'd rather hand us a data export or feed than have me read pages, we would honestly love that. It's lighter on your servers and better for us. Same address.

§What happens to the data

It's published at propertytaxes.me, where owner names are masked by default and any owner can ask to have theirs withheld entirely. We treat your residents' records the way we'd want ours treated. Details in our privacy policy.

§Would you like your county indexed?

We're actively adding Kansas counties, and we'd like yours. If you'd like your residents to be able to look up their appraisal and tax history in one place, email us. The quickest path is a data export or feed from your appraiser and treasurer systems, which means I never have to read a single page of yours. If that's not possible, we'll work from your public portal at the pace described above, on a schedule you're comfortable with.