# 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](https://polar.sh)**, 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](https://buy.polar.sh/polar_cl_n3W1BewLJ02SIua2jl3YVOBqtUxohrd7rt4FR4ZGKGT) —
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](faq.md) 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.