Terms of Service

1. Agreement

These Terms are an agreement between you and [legal entity name] ("RuneShips," "we," "us"). They cover runeships.com and our related services (the "Service"). Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle personal information. By creating an account, starting a trial, buying a plan, or otherwise using the Service, you agree to these Terms. If you don't agree, don't use the Service.

If you use the Service for an organisation, you confirm you can bind it, and "you" includes that organisation.

2. Eligibility

• You must be at least 16 years old.
• To buy a paid plan, you must be 18 or older, or have a parent or guardian's permission, with that parent or guardian paying and accepting these Terms for you.
• You may not use the Service if the law prohibits you from doing so, including under US sanctions or export laws.

3. Your account

Keep your sign-in details accurate and secure. You're responsible for activity under your account. Tell us immediately at hello@runeships.com if you think someone else has accessed it. One person per account; recruiter seats may not be shared.

Account types

When you sign up, you choose the kind of account you need: a student account, a company account for posting tasks, or a recruiter account for finding and screening candidates. Company and recruiter accounts are "hiring accounts." You can't switch an account's type yourself once it's set; write to us if you need it changed.

Hiring accounts

• Work email. A hiring account must be opened with a work email at a domain your organisation controls. We don't accept personal or disposable email addresses for hiring accounts, and we confirm the address with a one-time code, or through your organisation's Google account when you sign up with Google.
• Authority. By opening a hiring account, you confirm that you work for, or are authorised to act for, the organisation you name and the email domain you sign up with, and that you can accept these Terms for it.
• Accurate details. The organisation's name, website and other details you give us must be true and kept up to date. You won't pose as another organisation or person.
• Our review. We review each new organisation before its tasks are shown to students. We may ask for more information, decline an organisation, hide its tasks, or suspend or close a hiring account that we believe misrepresents who it is or breaks these Terms.
• Your team. You're responsible for everyone who uses a hiring account or seat on your organisation's behalf, and for removing access when someone leaves.

4. The Service

RuneShips lets students complete real-world tasks and receive evaluations, feedback, job matches and interview practice. It lets recruiters and employers browse candidates who have opted in, run tasks as screening rounds, and compare submissions. Career centres can buy aggregated cohort analytics.

We may add, change or remove features. If we remove a core feature of a paid plan during a period you've paid for, you can cancel and get a pro-rated refund for the unused part of that period.

5. Plans, billing and automatic renewal

No paid plans are on sale yet. RuneShips is free during the launch, and we don't collect payment details. Paid plans may be introduced later. If they are, we'll email you before anything changes, and the rest of this section applies only to a paid plan you choose to start.

• Prices. Current plans and prices are on our pricing page. Prices are in US dollars and exclude taxes, which we add where required.
• Automatic renewal. Paid plans are subscriptions that renew automatically every month, at the then-current price, and are charged to your payment method until you cancel. Before you pay, we show you the price, the billing frequency and how to cancel, and we email you a confirmation of these terms.
• Cancelling. Cancel at any time, online, from your account's billing settings, or by emailing hello@runeships.com. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period, and you keep access until then.
• Refunds. Except where these Terms or the law say otherwise, payments aren't refundable and we don't pro-rate partial months. If you're a consumer in the EEA or UK, you may have a 14-day right to withdraw. When you ask to start a paid plan straight away, you agree that we can begin immediately, and a withdrawal may be reduced in proportion to the service already provided.
• Price changes. We'll give you at least 30 days' notice by email before a price change affects your renewal. The new price applies from your next renewal after the notice period. You can cancel before then.
• Failed payments. If a payment fails, we may retry it, and we may pause or downgrade paid features until it's resolved.
• Payment processor. Paid plans may be introduced later. If they are, payments will be handled by a payment processor under its own terms, and we won't store full card numbers.

6. Launch period and free premium

• During the launch, recruiter and company accounts are free. Every new company gets the premium plan free for three months from when it's created. We don't need a payment method.
• When those three months end, premium features pause and the account moves to the free plan. Nothing is charged, nothing renews, and your account and its data are not deleted.
• A free period never turns into a paid plan. If paid plans are introduced, we'll email you first, and nothing is charged unless you choose one.
• One free premium period per organisation. We may end it if it's being misused.

7. Your content

"Your content" means anything you submit or upload: submissions, reasoning, files, code, CVs, interview recordings, tasks, notes and profile details.

• You own your content. These Terms don't transfer ownership of it to us.
• Licence to operate. You give RuneShips a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, copy, process, transmit and display your content only as needed to provide and secure the Service. This includes sending it to our service providers (for example, AI providers for evaluation), showing it to recruiters in line with your visibility settings and task applications, and making de-identified or aggregated data to calibrate and improve scoring. The licence ends when you delete the content, except for copies kept under our retention schedule or already made by recruiters you shared with.
• No marketing use without permission. We won't use your content, name or likeness in marketing, case studies or publicity without your separate written consent.
• Your promises. You confirm that you have the rights to your content; that submissions are your own work, apart from sources you disclose; and that your content doesn't infringe anyone's rights, contain other people's personal information without permission, or break the law.

8. Evaluations and AI

Scores, levels, trends, feedback and job matches are produced with the help of AI models and, for paid task runs, human review. You agree that:

• Evaluations are advisory opinions about a piece of work. They can be wrong, incomplete or inconsistent.
• They are not a credential, certification or degree, and not an assessment of anyone's character or general fitness for employment.
• RuneShips doesn't make hiring decisions, and evaluations guarantee no job, interview or other outcome.
• You can ask for human review of any evaluation by emailing hello@runeships.com.
• You won't misrepresent your RuneShips results, for example on a CV, and you won't present them as anything other than an evaluation on the RuneShips platform.

9. Rules for recruiters and employers

If you use RuneShips to find, screen or hire people, you agree to the following.

• Lawful hiring. You'll comply with all employment, anti-discrimination, privacy and labour laws that apply to your hiring, including Title VII, the ADA, the ADEA and their state and local equivalents.
• No decisions on scores alone. You won't rely only on RuneShips evaluations to make a hiring or other employment decision. You'll apply your own human judgement and review the underlying work.
• AI-in-hiring laws. Where you use RuneShips evaluations in a way covered by laws on automated or AI hiring tools (for example New York City Local Law 144, the Colorado AI Act, the Illinois Human Rights Act, or the EU AI Act), you're responsible for the notices, assessments, audits and accommodations those laws require of employers and deployers. We'll give you reasonable information about how evaluations work to help.
• Not a consumer report. RuneShips isn't a consumer reporting agency, and evaluations aren't consumer reports or background checks under the Fair Credit Reporting Act or similar laws. You won't use the Service as a background check, or for credit, insurance, tenancy or any other purpose governed by those laws.
• Candidate data. You'll use candidate information only for recruiting the candidate for real roles, and keep it confidential. You won't sell it, add it to marketing lists, or share it outside your hiring team. You'll delete any exports when they're no longer needed, when the candidate asks, or when your account ends.
• Contact. You'll contact candidates only about genuine opportunities. You'll respect a candidate's request to stop, and comply with anti-spam laws.
• Honest roles. You won't post fake roles, collect application fees, or misrepresent your organisation.
• Scout and other platforms. If you use the Scout browser extension, it reads only the results on your screen while you've switched it on. It never clicks, scrolls, searches or sends messages for you, and it keeps only a person's name, profile link and Scout's reasons. You're responsible for making sure your use of other services alongside Scout, such as professional networks and recruiting tools, complies with their own terms.
• Suggestions, not rejections. Scout's shortlists and scores are suggestions for you to review. Nothing on RuneShips rejects a candidate automatically, and you won't configure or use the Service to do so.

10. Rules for tasks

If you post or bring your own task:

• It must be a genuine exercise for evaluating skills, not unpaid production work. You won't use student submissions in your business, commercially or otherwise, unless you have a separate agreement with the student, including pay where the law requires it.
• You have the rights to everything you provide, and you won't include confidential third-party information or personal data.
• You give us and participating students a licence to use the task materials to complete, evaluate and discuss the task on the Service.

11. Company names and the interview world

Some practice interviews are modelled on the style of interviews at well-known companies. Those companies aren't affiliated with RuneShips and don't sponsor or endorse it. Their names and logos belong to their owners and are used only to describe the style of practice. Practice interviews are simulations. They don't predict or reflect any company's actual hiring process or decisions.

12. Acceptable use

You won't:

• Break the law or infringe anyone's rights
• Submit someone else's work as your own, or use undisclosed AI-generated work where a task forbids it
• Manipulate scores or rankings, for example with fake or duplicate accounts or automated submissions
• Scrape, crawl or bulk-export the Service, or use it to build a competing database
• Reverse-engineer our scoring, prompts or rubrics, or probe our security
• Upload malware, or code meant to attack our systems or the code sandbox
• Harass, threaten, discriminate against or impersonate anyone
• Resell or sublicense the Service without our written agreement

13. Code you submit

Code you submit to coding questions runs in an isolated third-party sandbox, not on your device. Don't include passwords, API keys or personal information in code. We may limit how long code runs and what resources it uses.

14. Our intellectual property

The Service belongs to RuneShips and our licensors, and is protected by intellectual property law. That includes its software, design, tasks we write, rubrics, prompts and the RuneShips name and marks. We give you a limited, revocable, non-transferable right to use the Service under these Terms. If you send us feedback or ideas, we can use them without owing you anything.

15. Third-party services

The Service links to, or relies on, third-party services such as payment processing and email. Their own terms govern your use of them, and we aren't responsible for them.

16. Suspension and termination

You can stop using the Service and delete your account at any time. We may suspend or end your access if you breach these Terms, if we must do so by law, or to protect users or the Service. Where reasonable, we'll give notice first. If we end a paid plan without cause, we'll refund the unused part of the period you paid for. Sections that by their nature should survive termination will survive, including Sections 7 to 9 and 17 to 23.

17. Disclaimers

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available." To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title and non-infringement. We don't promise that the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free or secure, that evaluations will be accurate or free from bias, or that using the Service will lead to any educational, employment or financial outcome.

Some jurisdictions don't allow these exclusions, so some of them may not apply to you. Nothing in these Terms limits rights you have as a consumer that can't be waived by law.

18. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, RuneShips and its owners, officers, employees and suppliers won't be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages. That includes lost profits, data, goodwill or employment opportunities. Our total liability for all claims relating to the Service is limited to the greater of (a) the amounts you paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose, and (b) US $100.

These limits don't apply to liability that can't be limited by law, such as for fraud, gross negligence, wilful misconduct, or death or personal injury caused by negligence.

19. Indemnity

If you use the Service for an organisation, or as a recruiter or task poster, you'll defend and indemnify RuneShips against third-party claims, and related losses and reasonable legal fees, arising from your content, your breach of these Terms, or your hiring decisions and use of candidate information. Individual consumers indemnify us only to the extent the law allows.

20. Copyright complaints

If you believe content on the Service infringes your copyright, send a notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to our designated agent: [DMCA agent name and address, as registered with the US Copyright Office], email hello@runeships.com, subject line "DMCA Notice." Your notice must include:

• Your physical or electronic signature
• The work you say is infringed
• The material you say is infringing, and its URL
• Your contact details
• A statement that you believe in good faith the use isn't authorised
• A statement, under penalty of perjury, that your notice is accurate and that you're authorised to act

We'll respond as the DMCA requires, including handling counter-notices. We terminate the accounts of repeat infringers.

21. Disputes, arbitration and class-action waiver

Please read this section carefully. It affects your legal rights.

Informal resolution first

Before starting a claim, email hello@runeships.com with a description of the dispute. We'll both try in good faith to resolve it within 60 days.

Binding individual arbitration

If we can't resolve a dispute informally, you and RuneShips agree to resolve it by binding individual arbitration administered by JAMS under its applicable rules. The Federal Arbitration Act governs this agreement. Hearings may be held by video or in your home county. For consumer claims, we'll pay JAMS fees beyond the amount you would have paid to file in court.

Exceptions

Either party may bring an individual claim in small-claims court, or seek an injunction in court for intellectual property misuse.

Class-action waiver

Claims may be brought only individually, not as a plaintiff or class member in any class, collective or representative proceeding.

If this waiver is found unenforceable for a claim, that claim goes to court and the rest of this section still applies.

30-day opt-out

You can opt out of arbitration and the class-action waiver by emailing hello@runeships.com, with the subject line "Arbitration Opt-Out", within 30 days of first accepting these Terms. Include the email address on your account. Opting out doesn't affect the rest of these Terms.

Consumers outside the US

If you're a consumer in the EEA, UK or Switzerland, this section doesn't apply to you, and you can bring claims in the courts where you live.

22. Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of [California] and US federal law, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules. Subject to Section 21, the state and federal courts in [county, state] have exclusive jurisdiction. Mandatory consumer protections where you live still apply.

23. General

• Changes. We may update these Terms. For material changes, we'll email you at least 14 days before they take effect. If you keep using the Service after that, you accept the changes. If you don't accept them, cancel before they take effect, and we'll refund any prepaid period that runs past that date. Changes to Section 21 don't apply to disputes we already knew about.
• Entire agreement. These Terms, the Privacy Policy and any order form or plan details make up the whole agreement between us about the Service.
• Severability and waiver. If a provision can't be enforced, the rest still applies. Not enforcing a provision isn't a waiver of it.
• Assignment. You can't transfer these Terms without our consent. We may transfer them as part of a merger, acquisition or sale of assets.
• Force majeure. We aren't liable for delays caused by events beyond our reasonable control.
• Notices. We'll send notices to the email address on your account. Send notices to us at hello@runeships.com, and by mail to [postal address].
• Relationship. We're independent contractors. Nothing in these Terms creates an employment, agency or partnership relationship, including between RuneShips and students.

24. Contact

[legal entity name] · [postal address] · hello@runeships.com