Terms of Service

1. Acceptance

By creating an account on RunKey.ai ("RunKey", "we") or using any part of the service, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, do not use the service. If you are using RunKey on behalf of an organisation, you confirm you may bind that organisation to these terms.

2. What RunKey provides

RunKey rents GPU compute, metered by the second. You choose a GPU model and the node it runs on, we start an instance for you, and you get root access to it over SSH for as long as you keep it running.

The capacity is sourced from third-party GPU marketplaces and operated by independent node operators, not by us. We select the nodes, hold the price and run the console; the underlying hardware belongs to someone else. This has two consequences worth stating plainly: a specific node is never guaranteed, and an instance can be lost if the node it runs on goes away.

Every instance boots the same image — Ubuntu with the NVIDIA CUDA stack and an SSH server — and installs a management panel reachable through a tunnel. Anything else on the instance is installed by you.

3. Your account

You must give an accurate email address, be at least 18 or the legal age where you live, and keep your credentials and SSH keys to yourself. Activity under your account, and anything running on instances deployed from it, is your responsibility.

One account is one customer. You may not share an account to work around per-account limits, and you may not create accounts to evade a suspension.

4. Credits and pricing

RunKey is prepaid. You buy credits in packs; instances spend them. There is no subscription and no invoice at the end of the month.

• Each GPU model has a fixed credit rate, published in the console and on the pricing page. It does not float with market supply.
• Metering runs by the second, from the moment an instance reports running until it is terminated. There is no minimum billable period and no rounding up to the hour.
• An instance that never reaches the running state costs nothing. A terminated instance stops costing immediately.
• Credits do not expire, and unused credits stay on the account until they are spent.
• A deploy requires at least one hour of that instance's rate on your balance. When a balance reaches zero, running instances are terminated automatically. Keeping enough balance for the work you have running is your responsibility, and everything on an instance terminated this way is lost with it.

We may change pack prices, GPU rates and the catalogue at any time. A change takes effect from when it is published; credits already bought keep the number of credits they bought.

5. Payments and refunds

Payments are taken by third-party payment providers. You are handed to the provider's own page to pay, and RunKey never receives or stores your card details. The provider holds the price for the pack; we tell it which pack you chose, not what to charge.

How many credits a payment is worth is decided by RunKey from the pack recorded when the purchase started, not from anything the provider sends back. Credits are added once the payment is confirmed.

Credit purchases are otherwise non-refundable, and unused credits are not exchangeable for money. Two exceptions, because they are our doing and not yours:

• If the same purchase is paid twice — most often by starting a payment with one method and completing it with another — only one lot of credits is delivered and the duplicate charge is refunded.
• If a payment is taken and the credits cannot be placed on an account, we refund it rather than keep it.

If a payment is disputed or reversed with the provider, we may remove the corresponding credits and suspend the account while it is sorted out.

6. Your instance, your data

You get root on the instance. What you install, what you run and what you put on the disk is yours to manage and yours to be responsible for, including under any licence attached to models, datasets or software you bring.

There are no backups and no snapshots. When an instance is terminated — by you, by the automatic zero-balance termination, by us, or by the node failing — its disk is destroyed and the data is gone. Anything you need has to be copied off before then.

An instance runs on real hardware on the public internet, operated by a third party. Do not put data on it that you could not accept a node operator having access to, and do not expose services on it without authentication.

7. Prohibited use

This section says what RunKey is not for. It is a list of prohibitions, not a list of permissions: nothing here should be read as approval of anything that is merely absent from it.

You may not use RunKey, or an instance rented through it, for:

• Adult or NSFW content of any kind. No pornographic, sexually explicit, nude or otherwise not-safe-for-work material — generating it, training or fine-tuning on it, storing it, processing it, or serving it to anyone else. This applies to real and synthetic subjects alike, to drawn and animated work, and to anything built to produce such material even when the instance itself is only being used to develop or host it. Child sexual abuse material and non-consensual intimate imagery are additionally criminal, reported, and grounds for immediate closure.
• Impersonation and deception. Deepfakes, face or voice cloning and synthetic likenesses of a real person made to deceive, defraud, harass or sexualise them.
• Anything unlawful where you are, where we are, or where the node is.
• Attacks and network abuse. Scanning, flooding, denial of service, intrusion, proxying abuse, or any other interference with networks, systems or people who did not ask for it.
• Spam and malware. Bulk unsolicited messaging, credential stuffing, phishing infrastructure, botnets, and the distribution of malicious software.
• Content or models you have no right to. Anything you do not hold the necessary rights or licences for.
• Attacks on RunKey itself. Interfering with our systems, the panel, the metering, or another customer's instance.

The node operator's own rules also apply to your instance, and are additional to these. A workload that gets a node suspended upstream will be stopped here too.

We do not monitor what runs on an instance, so this list is enforced when something is reported or surfaces upstream. When it is, the response is immediate termination of the instances involved and, depending on what was found, closure of the account — see section 9. Credits on an account closed for this reason are not refunded.

8. Availability

We do not offer an uptime guarantee or an SLA. Capacity depends on an upstream marketplace, hosts appear and disappear, and an instance can fail for reasons outside our control. RunKey is suitable for development, training and batch work; it is not sold as fault-tolerant production hosting.

You are not charged for an instance that never ran, and metering stops when an instance stops. Beyond that, lost time on an instance is not compensated.

9. Suspension and termination

We may suspend an account, terminate running instances, or close an account if these terms are broken, if a payment is reversed, or if a workload puts the platform, a node or another customer at risk. Where the situation allows it, we will say what happened and why.

You can stop using RunKey at any time; terminating your instances is what stops the spending. Closing the account is yours to do, in Settings, once nothing is running on it — and credits left on a closed account are forfeited, as with any other refund. Records we have to keep for accounting and fraud purposes are kept, as described in the privacy policy.

10. Intellectual property

Everything you bring to an instance, and everything it produces, is yours. We claim no rights over it and do not use it for anything but running the service. RunKey's own software, branding and documentation remain ours.

11. Limitation of liability

The service is provided as-is. To the maximum extent the law allows, RunKey is not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential damages, including lost profits, lost work, or data destroyed with a terminated instance. Our total liability for any claim is limited to what you paid us in the twelve months before it arose.

12. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The current version always lives on this page with the date it was last changed at the top, and continuing to use RunKey after a change means accepting it. For a change that materially affects what you have already paid for, we will make sure it is visible before it takes effect.

13. Contact

Questions about these terms go to support@runkey.ai, or through the contact page.