Terms of Service

Last updated 2026-09-23.

Who you are contracting with

earthruntime is a product of Provocative Science Holdings, Inc ("we", "us"). These terms govern your use of the earthruntime inference API at api.earthruntime.com and the website at earthruntime.com. By requesting a key or sending a request to the API, you agree to them.

The service

We operate inference hardware and serve open-weight language models over an OpenAI-compatible HTTP API. The models we serve, the precision each is served at, and the context window each is given are listed on the models section and in the documentation. We may add, remove or change models, and we may withdraw the service entirely, on the notice set out under discontinuing the service.

Keys and accounts

• There is no account and no password. An API key is the whole credential. Whoever holds it can spend the credit attached to it.
• Keys are shown once, at issue. We do not store a form we can show you again. If you lose a key, email us and we will issue a replacement and retire the old one.
• One key per email address. Credits bought against an address land on the key registered to it.
• Keep your key secret. Usage billed to a key is billed to you, including usage by anyone who obtained the key from you.

Credits and billing

• Prepaid only. You buy credit in advance and spend it per token. There is no subscription, no invoice and no overdraft.
• Metering. You are billed on the usage block of each response: prompt_tokens at the model's input rate and completion_tokens at its output rate. Reasoning tokens are part of completion_tokens and are billed at the output rate.
• Free credit. New keys are issued with a small prepaid balance, currently sized to deliver at least 100,000 tokens. It is promotional, is not purchased, and carries no refund value.
• Credits do not expire. Unused credit stays on the key.
• Zero balance. When a balance reaches zero the key stops working and requests return HTTP 402 until credit is added. Nothing is queued and nothing is charged in arrears.
• Payments are processed by Stripe. We do not receive or store your card details. Charges appear as Provocative Science Holdings, Inc.
• Refunds. If something went wrong, email contact@earthruntime.com and we will sort it out. We would rather refund a customer than argue with one.
• All prices are in US dollars and exclusive of any applicable taxes.

Rate changes

Current per-token rates are published at earthruntime.com/#pricing and in machine-readable form at /pricing.md. Those two are the authoritative statement of what you pay, and no rate is hidden in page scripts.

• We may change rates. An increase takes effect no sooner than 30 days after we publish it, and we will email the address each active key is registered to when we publish one.
• A decrease may take effect immediately.
• Credit you have already bought is not revalued. Credit is a dollar balance, so a rate increase buys fewer tokens with the balance you are holding, and a decrease buys more. We will not retroactively reprice usage that has already been billed.
• If a rate increase is not acceptable to you, email us before it takes effect and we will refund your unused credit.

Acceptable use

Do not use the service to do the obvious harms, and do not use it in ways that would put the service itself at risk. Specifically, you agree not to:

• break the law, or help someone else break it;
• generate sexual content involving minors, or content whose purpose is to harass, defame or threaten a specific person;
• build or refine weapons, malware, or tooling whose main purpose is unauthorised access to systems;
• present model output as human-written where doing so is deceptive and material, such as in reviews, academic submissions or political messaging;
• resell raw access to the API as an undifferentiated substitute for it, without talking to us first;
• deliberately attempt to exhaust, destabilise or circumvent the metering of the service. There is no published rate limit today, which is not an invitation. If you need sustained high throughput, tell us and we will make room for it.

You are responsible for what you send us and for what you do with what comes back.

Model outputs

This section matters more than most of this document, so it is in plain words.

• Model output can be wrong, and it can be confidently wrong. A language model will sometimes produce a fluent, well-formed answer that is factually incorrect, including answers that appear to quote your own input back at you accurately when they do not.
• We do not verify output. We make no warranty that output is accurate, complete, current, non-infringing or fit for any purpose.
• Do not use output as the sole basis for a decision with medical, legal, financial or safety consequences without a human who is competent to check it.
• Identical requests may return different output. Setting seed makes this much more stable but is not an absolute guarantee across model or infrastructure changes.
• We do not claim ownership of the output you generate. As between you and us, it is yours, subject to the licence of the underlying open-weight model and to the rights of any third party in the input you supplied.
• Open-weight models carry their own licences from their publishers. Your use of a model through us is also subject to that model's licence.

Availability

• The service is provided on an as-is, as-available basis. There is no uptime commitment and no service level agreement.
• We do not currently publish a status page. If the API is failing, email contact@earthruntime.com and a human will answer.
• Published benchmark figures describe one measured run, from one place, on one day. They are not a performance guarantee. The methodology and the script are on the benchmarks page so you can check them yourself.
• We may take capacity down for maintenance. We will try to make that boring and infrequent.
• We can withdraw the service, or a model in it, on at least 3 days' notice with a full refund of unused purchased credit. See discontinuing the service.

Discontinuing the service

Read this before you build something load-bearing on us.

• We can withdraw the service, or any model in it, on short notice. We will give you at least 3 days' notice by email to the address your key is registered to, and in practice we will give more where we can.
• If we do, we refund the unused credit on your key in full. You do not have to ask and you do not have to argue. Promotional credit that was never purchased has no refund value, but everything you paid for comes back.
• This applies to the whole service and to individual models. A model can be retired the same way, with the same notice and the same refund if you are left holding credit you bought to use on it.
• We are a small company running our own hardware. Three days is the floor, not the plan, and it is written down here so that you can size your dependency on us honestly rather than discovering the answer later.

Keep a fallback path configured. The API is OpenAI-compatible precisely so that switching away from us costs you a base URL and a key.

Suspension and termination

We may suspend or terminate a key that is being used in breach of the acceptable use section, that is creating a risk to the service or to other customers, or where we are required to by law. Where we can do so safely, we will tell you first and give you a chance to fix it. If we terminate a key for reasons other than a breach by you, we will refund the unused credit on it.

You can stop using the service at any time. If you want your remaining credit back, email us.

Liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue or lost data, arising from your use of the service. Our total liability for any claim relating to the service is limited to the amount you paid us in the three months before the claim arose.

Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, and some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusions above, in which case they apply to you only to the extent permitted.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The "last updated" date at the top of this page always reflects the current version. Where a change materially reduces your rights, we will email the address each active key is registered to before it takes effect. Continuing to use the service after that point means you accept the change.

Contact

Provocative Science Holdings, Inc
contact@earthruntime.com

See also the privacy policy.