We’re still working on the details of how licensing will work for server-based instances of Rhino. Here’s our current strategy Updated Sept 3, 2020:
Core-Hour Billing
You are required to enable Core-Hour billing on a Cloud Zoo team, add a credit card on file, then add one or more service accounts to that team. For details, see https://github.com/mcneel/compute.rhino3d/blob/master/docs/production.md#1-core-hour-billing
When Rhino is logged in to a service account and is running on a Windows Server-based operating system, you will be billed $0.10 per core per hour that Rhino is running (pro-rated per minute).
This means that if you have Rhino running for 1 hour on a 32-core machine, you’ll be billed $1.60.
Billing is based on uptime, not on usage - we don’t track the activity of each core, just that you have one running with Rhino. You can scale your workloads up and down to optimize performance and cost to you.
Edit Oct 23,2019: We’re now considering removing the perpetual licensing model for server-based licenses.
Edit Sept 3, 2020: Perpetual licensing will not be available for server-based licenses.
Single computer licensing not supported on Windows Server
When running on Windows Server, it will not be possible to enter a license key to run as a single-computer license, as Rhino requires a license per core. That feature is only supported via core-hour billing, as described above.