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Licensing

A Lifeboat deployment is licensed per cluster. The licence gates starting an inference server and nothing else: the console, the model registry, the audit log and the licence page itself always work, so the page that tells you a licence is required is always reachable.

Can I use it before I have a licence?

Section titled “Can I use it before I have a licence?”

Yes, two ways, and they are different mechanisms that are easy to confuse.

Grace period Free trial
Length 24 hours 7 days
Starts on first boot of the first node your first paid subscription
Needs nothing — no key, no sign-up, no card a card, through the customer portal
Who gets it every install, always first purchase only

The 24-hour grace period begins when the deployment first boots and needs no action at all — install and start serving. The 7-day trial is a billing arrangement on a paid plan.

The grace clock is anchored on first boot and stored in the data volume, so restarting the container does not reset it. A deployment running with no persistent volume gets a fresh 24 hours on every restart; that is accepted behaviour, not a bug, but it is also not a supported way to run in production.

Is there a free tier?

Section titled “Is there a free tier?”

Yes, for non-commercial and evaluation use: up to 2 concurrent inference servers on a single node. Confidential computing is not included. Everything else — the full optimization layer, the load balancer, the OpenAI-compatible API, the console — is present.

How do I activate?

Section titled “How do I activate?”

Online. Open the License page in the console, enter the LB-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX key, and activate. The key binds to this deployment’s cluster ID; one licence, one cluster. After that the deployment checks in periodically and needs no further action.

Air-gapped / offline. The order matters here, and getting it wrong produces a file your install will refuse:

  1. Install first, with no licence key. The deployment boots into its 24-hour grace period and generates its own cluster ID.
  2. Read that cluster ID off the console’s License page.
  3. Buy in the portal, choose Offline, and give one cluster ID per licence.
  4. The signed licence file arrives by email, already bound to your cluster ID. Upload it on the License page, or drop it on the data volume and point LIFEBOAT_LICENSE_FILE at it.

An offline licence is cryptographically bound to one cluster ID and cannot be re-bound after issue. It also never contacts anything, which is the point — but it means a deployment that loses its data volume gets a new cluster ID and needs the licence re-issued. Keep the volume backed up.

What happens when grace expires without a licence?

Section titled “What happens when grace expires without a licence?”

Starting a server returns a clear “licence required” response and the console opens the activation dialog. The control plane, the console and servers that are already running are unaffected — Lifeboat does not stop live traffic on the strength of a licence check. The next start asks for a key.

Can I move a licence to a different machine?

Section titled “Can I move a licence to a different machine?”

A licence binds to one cluster ID, and the cluster ID legitimately changes when a host is rebuilt or a data volume is lost. Contact your Iterate.ai representative to release the binding; the key can then be activated against the new cluster ID. Deactivating on the License page clears the licence locally but does not release the binding on Iterate.ai’s side, which is why a re-activation elsewhere can still report a cluster mismatch until the binding is released.

An online deployment learns about a released binding on its next check-in, immediately if someone opens its License page, and on the next attempt to start a server. An offline licence never phones home, so it must be deactivated on the machine itself.

Are paid add-ons separate?

Section titled “Are paid add-ons separate?”

Yes. Confidential computing is a licensed capability rather than a configuration flag: requesting it without the entitlement leaves it dormant and reports why. On an online licence, an upgrade reaches a running deployment on its next check-in — no new key and no restart. An offline deployment needs a re-issued licence file. See Security and compliance.

What does the deployment send to Iterate.ai?

Section titled “What does the deployment send to Iterate.ai?”

A licensed deployment checks in periodically with its licence key, cluster ID, node count and version. An unlicensed deployment reports a daily census with no licence key. Both carry a short hardware description — accelerator, memory, CPU — sent once per distinct configuration, so that support can answer questions about the platform you are actually running on.

No model names, prompts, completions or token counts are ever collected. Set LIFEBOAT_TELEMETRY=off to stop the census; the licence check-in continues, because demonstrating that a licence is bound to one cluster is a contractual obligation rather than telemetry. An air-gapped licence sends nothing at all.

Sources and references

Section titled “Sources and references”