DealBox is a calculator for pricing a small business acquisition.
Bring in a listing, set the terms you are being offered, and see what is left after debt service, tax and any reserve you keep. Then it grades the deal against criteria you wrote yourself.
If DealBox requested a page from your site, this is why.
A buyer using the app pasted the address of one of your pages and asked the app to read the figures off it. That produces one request, for that one address, at that moment. If your site redirects it, it follows the redirect the way a browser would, so a redirect chain shows the entries a redirect always shows. There is no crawler, no queue, no schedule and no link following. Nothing revisits the page later. Pasting an address is one of three ways to enter a listing. The other two, importing a screenshot and typing the figures in, never touch your site at all.
The request carries a User-Agent that begins with the word DealBox and says what the request is for. It does not claim to be a browser and it will not. As it stands today:
DealBox (iOS app; one listing page, fetched because a buyer pasted its address; +https://thetradescript.com/apps/dealbox)
Match on DealBox and you will catch it.
How to stop it
Refuse any request whose User-Agent contains DealBox. A 401, 403, 405 or 429 ends the attempt: the app treats a refusal as an answer and tells the buyer the page will not open. There is no retry, no proxy, no second User-Agent and no headless browser behind it. If you would rather tell us directly, contact DealBox support.
What it takes, and what it keeps
It reads the page's own title, its description and the figures it can identify, and puts them in a form for the buyer to check. It does not log in, it does not follow links, and it never sees a page a signed-out visitor could not. The address itself is used for the import and then discarded: it is not written to the buyer's deal, and it does not appear in anything the app can share.
Your log will also show the buyer's IP address, exactly as it would if they had opened the page in Safari. The request goes straight from their phone. There is no proxy and no server of ours in between.
What the app stores, and what it does not.
DealBox is closer to a spreadsheet on your phone than to a service you log into.
Pasting a listing address is the one part of the app that needs a network connection. Saving or sending a deal summary happens through the system share sheet, when you choose it, to wherever you choose.
It prices the deal in front of you. That is the whole job.
DealBox does not find deals, value businesses or replace diligence, and nothing in it is advice about what you should buy. It is a calculator with your standards written into it.
The tax figure is a flat effective-rate estimate. It ignores entity structure, state tax, QBI, payroll treatment of owner compensation and bonus depreciation on equipment. It is built for comparing deals against each other, not for filing anything.
One number at the bottom, and every line that produced it.
The headline is what the business pays you in a year after the bank, the tax and the reserve. The derivation is on screen line by line, and every figure it rests on is one you can change.
The derivation
What it measures
It has no opinion about your deal. It has your criteria.
Before you grade anything you write down what you are looking for: the salary you need the business to pay you, the DSCR floor you want, what you will pay as a multiple, your ceiling on price, and the industry, location, years operating and team size you will take on. That is your box. Every deal you bring in is measured against it and told how it lines up.
The app never tells you to buy anything and never tells you to walk away. A verdict is a statement about the fit between a deal and a standard you set.
Three ways in, and a review screen on all of them.
Nothing an importer read goes straight into a deal. Every import lands on a review screen with the figures laid out for you to check and correct, because a number nobody looked at is worse than a blank.
Enter it yourself
The whole form, typed. It is the only route that never involves a machine reading anything.
Import an image
A photo of the listing, a screenshot from a broker app or a PDF page. Pick one from your photo library or paste from the clipboard. The text is recognised on the device by the system OCR.
Import via URL
It requires a network connection and a public address, and the site will see your IP address, like any other browser. Public pages only: anything behind a login it cannot read, and plenty of sites refuse an automated request outright. When that happens it says so, and does not retry.
An import that cannot find the asking price says so instead of calculating against nothing. Where the app has to assume something in order to show you anything, it says on the screen that it assumed it. The financing on a fresh import is a stated placeholder, and the tax rate is a flat 25 percent you can change. Set both before you believe the take-home figure.
Where the model is stricter than a simple one.
Every one of these makes some deals look worse than a simpler model would.
Interest and principal are tracked separately
Only the interest is deductible. Deducting the whole payment overstates what you keep.
Intangible amortization is modelled
An asset purchase amortizes intangibles over fifteen years under Section 197. It costs no cash and shelters real tax, so leaving it out understates take-home. You can switch it off and change the term.
Seller-note standby is modelled explicitly
Interest-only and full deferral produce very different year-one cash flow, and full deferral capitalizes the unpaid interest rather than forgiving it. You see coverage during standby and coverage after it, because a deal that only clears during standby has a cliff in it.
The capital stack is held to the price
Down payment, seller note and other debt are percentages, the bank tranche is always the remainder, and if the pieces add up to more than the price the app says so on the deal instead of quietly absorbing it.