Licensing

Runbay is free for personal use and requires a paid subscription for commercial use. Every feature is available in both cases — the line is who you are, not what you get. This is the same model OrbStack uses, and it's deliberate: the free tier has to beat every free open-source alternative outright, so nothing is held back.

The two cases, in plain language

Free — personal and non-commercial use

$0. Everything included. Container management, Stacks, docker-compose import, the migration assistant, Auto-MCP (tools, resources, and events), Agent Sandboxes, and the Supervisor. No account required, no feature flags, no nag screens. If you're using it for yourself, learning, hobby projects, or non-commercial work — this is you, and it's free.

Commercial — use at a company

$8 per user per month ($96/year). Required if you use Runbay for work at a company. You get everything in Free, plus a license that permits commercial use and priority support. It's an honor-system model with a license key — like OrbStack. We trust you to buy a seat when you're using it commercially.

A future Team tier (governance and agent-fleet features — audit logs, policy controls, headless task execution) may layer on top later. It does not gate anything you have today.

How activation works

Payments and license keys are handled by Polar, a Merchant of Record — which means Polar handles global sales tax and compliance, not us. When you subscribe, a license key is issued to you automatically.

The app validates and activates that key directly against Polar's hosted API. Important properties:

  • No backend of ours in the loop. Validation talks straight to Polar's public customer-portal API using only a public organization identifier. There is no Runbay license server, no account database on our side, and nothing about your usage is reported anywhere.
  • Seat limits are enforced by the key's activation cap — a subscription covers a set number of devices, and activating past the cap is refused.
  • Offline grace. Once your key validates, the result is cached securely in the macOS Keychain and re-checked periodically with a grace window. You won't get locked out on a flight or a bad connection — the app only hard-locks if a key is actually revoked or disabled (for example, after a refund).

Subscribe at buy.polar.sh — your license key arrives by email, and you enter it in the app under Settings ▸ License. The commercial terms apply the same way no matter which download channel you got Runbay from.

Common questions

I use it for a personal side project that makes a little money — do I need to pay? The intent is simple: personal and non-commercial use is free; use at a company is commercial. If you're operating as or inside a business, buy a seat. If you're a solo hobbyist, you're free.

Does my whole team each need a seat? Yes — it's priced per user, per month, and the license key's activation cap reflects the seats you buy.

What happens if I cancel or get refunded? A revoked or disabled key hard-locks the commercial license on the next validation. The free, personal-use path always remains available.

Is any of my data or telemetry sent when the license checks in? No. The only outbound call is the license validation to Polar, which uses a public organization ID. There's no analytics backend, no usage metering, and no sync server — see the FAQ on where your data lives.

Source and binary licensing

Runbay's source code is private and proprietary — it is not open source. The distributed binary is licensed under an End User License Agreement (EULA) that encodes the model above: free for personal use, commercial use requires an active subscription, license keys allow three device activations per seat, and the app never gates features. A copy of the EULA ships alongside every download.

Runbay bundles one third-party component, SwiftTerm (MIT License), whose attribution travels with the app in a NOTICES file. Apple's container CLI is a separate, Apple-licensed dependency you install yourself.