Who this is between
These terms are between you and Indexable, Inc., which builds and runs ix. "ix" here means all of it: the website at ix.dev, the API, the CLI, and the machines you start with them. Using any of it means these terms apply to you. If you are agreeing on behalf of a company, you are telling us you are allowed to.
Your account
You sign in with an email address, and that address is the account. Keep access to it, because whoever can read that inbox can reach your machines and your data. Everything done with your account is treated as done by you, including by a program you gave a key to. If you lose control of an account or a key, tell us and revoke the key.
One person, one account. Making extra accounts to get more free credit, more concurrency, or a fresh start after a suspension is a breach of these terms, and we may close all of them.
What runs on your machines
Your code and your data are yours. We claim no ownership of them and no license to them beyond what running them requires: storing them, moving them between our machines, and backing them up so we can give them back to you.
We do not read the contents of your machines to see what you are building. Our staff can reach guest storage, because operating a hosting platform requires it, and we access it only to keep the service working, to respond to a report of abuse or a security incident, or where the law requires it. We do not use your code or data to train models.
You are responsible for what you run, including whether you have the rights to it and whether it is legal where it runs.
What we charge, and when
ix is metered by the second. A machine bills for the CPU it burns, the memory it has faulted in, and the bytes it stores, at the rates published on the pricing page. A stopped machine bills for its stored bytes and nothing else. What each of those three meters actually counts is spelled out on that page, and the rates printed there are the same card the billing system charges from.
Usage draws down your balance as it accrues, so the account is prepaid rather than invoiced in arrears. Payments are handled by Stripe, and we never see or store your full card number. Balance you have already spent on usage is not refundable, because the compute has been delivered. If a payment fails we may stop your machines and, after telling you, remove them.
If you think a charge is wrong, write to us. We would rather look at the meter with you than argue about it.
Plans
A plan is a prepaid bundle of the same metered usage, not a different price for it. Each paid plan carries a monthly allowance of CPU and memory usage; that usage is metered at the ordinary rate card and drawn from the allowance first. Disk is deliberately outside every allowance and always bills at the published rate, because storage is the one resource that accumulates whether or not you are doing any work.
An allowance covers the month it belongs to and does not roll over: whatever is left at the end of a cycle is gone. When an allowance runs out, the default is that we stop starting new work rather than quietly charging you more; you can turn on continuing at ordinary metered rates from your balance instead. Plans renew monthly until you cancel, and cancelling takes effect at the end of the cycle you have paid for.
Signup credit
We give new accounts a one-time credit to try the service with, in the amount shown at signup. It is granted after you link a Discord account and we can see that it is a member of our server, which is how we keep the giveaway from funding a thousand throwaway accounts.
The credit is one per person and one per Discord account, whichever is fewer. It has no cash value, cannot be transferred, sold, or withdrawn, and can only be spent on ix usage. We can withhold it, take back an unspent balance of it, or end the offer, and we will do the first two if an account looks like it exists to collect it.
Bandwidth and fair use
We do not currently meter or charge for network traffic. That is a deliberate choice about the common case, not a promise of unlimited bandwidth, and we reserve discretion over it: if an account's traffic is out of proportion to the compute it buys, or is plainly the point of the account rather than a side effect of the work, we may rate limit it, ask you to move to a different arrangement, start charging for it, or suspend it. We will talk to you before doing any of that unless the traffic is causing damage now.
Concretely: running a build, an agent, a database, a crawler, or a service that talks to the internet is what ix is for. Using an ix machine as a bandwidth relay, a public file mirror, a proxy or VPN exit for others, or a content distribution network is not, whatever the byte count.
Rates can change
The rate card and the plan prices can change. We will post a change on the pricing page before it takes effect, and a plan price change applies from your next renewal, so you are never charged a new subscription price for a cycle you already bought. Metered rate changes apply from the date they take effect. If a change does not suit you, stop your machines and close the account; that is the whole remedy, since nothing here has a committed term.
Acceptable use
Do not use ix to:
- attack anyone: port scanning, credential stuffing, denial of service, exploiting systems you do not have permission to test
- send unsolicited bulk email, or host any part of a phishing operation
- mine cryptocurrency, or run any other workload whose value comes from consuming subsidized compute rather than from the compute itself
- store or distribute material that is illegal where you or we operate. Child sexual abuse material gets an account closed and reported, with no notice and no appeal
- break, evade, or probe the boundaries of the platform's own limits: escaping a machine, reaching another tenant, or working around metering, quotas, or the credit rules
- resell raw ix compute as a substitute for an ix account. Building a product on top of ix is fine and encouraged; reselling the machines themselves is not
Security research on your own machines is welcome. If you find a way out of one, or into someone else's, report it to us instead of using it, and we will treat you well for it.
Suspension, and closing your account
We can suspend or remove machines, or an account, if it breaks these terms, is not paying, or is actively damaging the platform or another tenant. Where we can we will warn you first and tell you what specifically is wrong; where something is on fire we will act first and explain immediately after. A suspension for a fixable problem is reversible, and we will say what fixing it looks like.
You can close your account whenever you like. Removing a machine or a snapshot deletes the data it held; copies can survive briefly in backups until those roll off. When you close an account we remove what is left of it, so take your data out first.
What we do not promise
ix is early. There is no uptime commitment and no service level agreement yet, and we would rather say that here than imply one. We do not promise that a machine stays up, that a snapshot restores, or that any particular performance number holds, and we provide the service as it is, without warranties of any kind.
So: keep your own copy of anything you cannot lose. We take durability seriously and we still mean this sentence.
Limits on liability
Neither of us is liable to the other for indirect, incidental, or consequential damages, including lost profits or lost data, and our total liability for any claim is limited to what you paid us in the three months before it arose. Some places do not allow limits like these, and where that is true this clause applies only as far as the law allows. This is a clause legal review will look at closely.
Changes to these terms
We can change these terms. The current version always lives at this URL with the date it last changed at the top. If a change materially affects what you can do or what you pay, we will email the address on your account before it takes effect. Continuing to use ix after that is how you accept the new version.
Still open
Two things are deliberately absent rather than forgotten. Governing law and how a dispute would actually be resolved are not settled in this draft, and neither is a formal address for legal notice. Legal review will add both, and until it does, nothing here should be read as a choice of law or a waiver of anything the law gives you.
Contact
Email hari@ix.dev. That reaches a person, not a queue, which is one of the advantages of us being this small.