FAQ

Yes. Claiming a name costs nothing and there is no paid tier. Advance Labs pays the ~$10/year for runs-on.dev itself; you never pay to claim, hold, or point a name.

No. runs-on.dev is a subdomain registry, not a top-level domain. Your name is <name>.runs-on.dev, not a domain you own outright. A real TLD means an ICANN application and running a registry, which is a different and much more expensive thing.

Advance Labs owns runs-on.dev. You are the recorded owner of your claimed record (domains/<name>.json), and only you can edit or remove it by pull request, but the name itself is granted, not sold or transferred to you.

Yes. The policy reserves the right to reclaim a name that goes dormant, or one used for impersonation, phishing, malware, or illegal content, without notice for the last four. Read the full policy at /policy.

Names would stop resolving. This runs on a wildcard DNS record and a GitHub Actions pipeline that Advance Labs operates; if Advance Labs stops paying for or maintaining runs-on.dev, every *.runs-on.dev name goes down with it. The registry is open source, so anyone could fork it and stand up their own domain, but that is a fork, not a guaranteed continuation of this one.

Yes, nothing in the policy restricts commercial use. Keep in mind it is still a free, best-effort service with no uptime guarantee, so treat it as you would any other free infrastructure you did not pay for.

Sign-in and eligibility both run through GitHub: your account needs to be at least 30 days old with at least one public repository, so claiming is cheap for a real developer and expensive for a bot farm sweeping names at scale.

One per account. That is a hard limit enforced at claim time, so a second name needs a second GitHub account.

A blocklist of brands actually impersonated in the wild, checked before eligibility on every claim. It is not exhaustive: if you see a name that should be blocked, email abuse@runs-on.dev or open a pull request against the blocklist.