Ark Licence Terms

Last updated: 6 September 2026

These terms cover your use of Ark, the local development environment made by CloudBlue Digital Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under company number 11158016, registered office 201 Springs Lane, Stalybridge, SK15 1HA ("we", "us", "CloudBlue Digital").

By installing or using Ark you accept these terms. If you are accepting on behalf of a company, you confirm you are allowed to bind it.

1. What Ark is

Ark installs and manages language runtimes, databases and web services on your own machine, and serves local sites. It runs on your computer. It is developer tooling, not a hosting service, and we do not operate anything on your behalf.

Ark has a free tier and a paid Pro tier. Some features are Pro-only. New installations also get a 14-day Pro evaluation, counted from the first time Ark runs on that machine.

2. What a licence gives you

When you buy a Pro licence we issue you a licence key. Subject to these terms, that key gives you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, worldwide right to install and use Ark's Pro features:

• on up to 2 devices,
• for your own use, or the internal business use of the organisation that bought it,
• for as long as these terms are in force.

You may use Ark for commercial work, including client work and work on paid products. We do not take any interest in what you build with it.

You may install Ark on more devices than your licence covers only if you buy the extra seats. Registering a device against your licence uses one of its seats; you can free a seat again by deactivating that device.

3. What a licence does not give you

You may not:

• share, resell, sublicense, rent or publish your licence key,
• remove or work around the licence checks, or use a key you were not issued,
• reverse engineer Ark's licensing in order to defeat it,

except where the law gives you a right we cannot exclude — in the UK and EU that includes certain interoperability rights, and nothing here limits them.

Your licence key contains your email address. It is signed data, not a password, but it identifies you. Treat it as personal to you.

4. Keys, revocation and the offline case

Ark verifies licence keys locally, using a signature. Activation works with no network connection, and Ark does not need to reach us in order to keep running.

When Ark can reach our licensing service it checks the key's current status. We may revoke or suspend a key if:

• it was obtained fraudulently or the payment was reversed,
• it is being shared or used beyond the seats it covers, or
• you are in serious breach of these terms.

A revoked key stops unlocking Pro features. We will tell you why, at the email address on the licence, unless we are prevented from doing so.

5. Subscription, renewal and what happens when it lapses

A Pro licence is sold as an annual subscription at £79 per year, which renews automatically until you cancel. Paddle takes the payment and manages the subscription; you can cancel at any time through the link on your receipt or through Paddle's customer portal.

A lapsed subscription does not switch your software off. Concretely:

• Ark stays installed and keeps running. We do not delete, disable or remotely brick software you have already installed.
• The Pro features unlocked by the last key issued to you while your subscription was current keep working on the devices where that key is activated.
• What you lose at the end of the paid period is new versions and support. Updates released after your subscription ends need a current subscription.

This is different from a revoked key (section 4). Cancelling normally, or simply letting a subscription lapse, is not a breach and does not cause a revocation.

6. Refunds

Refunds are covered by our Refund Policy, which forms part of these terms.

If a purchase is refunded, the licence it paid for ends. We will revoke the key, and Ark will drop back to the free tier on your devices the next time it checks in. Section 5's protection for lapsed subscriptions does not apply to a refunded one — you cannot keep the software and the money.

7. Open source components

Ark contains and downloads third-party open-source software, each covered by its own licence. Those licences are granted to you by their authors, not by us, and nothing in these terms replaces, restricts or overrides them. Where a component's licence conflicts with these terms, that component's licence wins for that component.

Two different things are involved:

• Components built into Ark — including the Caddy web server and a number of Go libraries. Their licences ship with Ark and are listed at Settings → Docs → Open Source Licences inside Ark, and by running ark licenses from the command line. That list is generated from Ark's own dependency manifest, so it always matches the version you have installed.
• Runtimes and services Ark downloads for you — PHP, Node.js, Go, Rust, Python, Ruby, Java, Kotlin, .NET, Deno, Bun, Zig, PostgreSQL, MySQL, ClickHouse and similar. Ark fetches these from their own publishers when you ask for them. We do not licence them to you and we are not responsible for them; your use of each is governed by whatever terms its publisher applies.

8. Updates

We may change Ark, including adding, changing and removing features. Ark can update itself; you can decline an update, but we only support current versions.

9. Warranties

We provide Ark as is. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that it will work with every project, runtime or operating system configuration.

We do warrant that we have the right to licence Ark to you.

If you are a consumer, you have legal rights about digital content that must be of satisfactory quality, fit for purpose and as described. Nothing in these terms affects those rights.

10. Liability

Ark runs on your machine, manages processes and files there, and can download and execute software from third-party publishers at your request. Please keep backups.

We do not exclude or limit our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot be excluded by law.

Subject to that:

• We are not liable for lost profits, lost revenue, lost or corrupted data, business interruption, or any indirect or consequential loss.
• Our total liability to you for everything arising out of or connected with Ark and these terms is limited to the amount you paid us for Ark in the 12 months before the claim.

If you are a consumer, we are liable for loss that is a foreseeable result of us breaking these terms, and we are not liable for loss that is not foreseeable. We are not liable for loss arising from using Ark for a business purpose if you bought it as a consumer.

11. Ending these terms

You can stop using Ark at any time; uninstall it and, if you want, deactivate your licence.

We can end your licence if you seriously breach these terms and do not put it right within 30 days of us asking you to. If we do, your right to use Pro features ends, and you should stop using them.

Sections 7, 9, 10 and 12 survive.

12. General

• Governing law. These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction. If you are a consumer, you may also bring proceedings in the country where you live.
• Changes. We may update these terms. If a change is material we will tell you before it takes effect, at the email on your licence. Continuing to use Ark after that means you accept the change; if you do not, you can stop using Ark and ask for a pro-rata refund of any period you have paid for and not used.
• Whole agreement. These terms, the Refund Policy and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us about Ark.
• Severability. If any part of these terms is unenforceable, the rest still applies.

Contact

CloudBlue Digital Ltd
201 Springs Lane, Stalybridge, SK15 1HA, United Kingdom
[email protected]