Licensing & Billing
Windows only

About 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).

Example 1: Rhino running on a 32-core server for one hour:

  • 1 computer * 32-cores * 1 hour * $0.10/core-hour = $3.20

Example 2: Rhino running on 200 4-core servers for 6 minutes:

  • 200 computers * 4 cores * 0.1 hour * $0.10/core-hour = $8.00

Example 3: 1 Rhino instance running on a 2-core server 8 hours a day for 30 days:

  • 1 computer * 2 cores * 8 hours/day * 30 days/month * $0.10/core-hour = $48/month

Example 4: 10 Rhino instances running on a 2-core server 8 hours a day for 30 days:

  • 1 computer * 2 cores * 8 hours/day * 30 days/month * $0.10/core-hour = $48/month
  • (Notice that the number of instances of Rhino does not affect your bill)

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.

Multiple instances are allowed - you may run as many instances of Rhino on the same machine as you want, and the cost will be the same as running one instance.

Setting Up Core-Hour Billing

Core-hour billing is required when running Rhino on a Windows Server-based operating system.

  1. Go to the Licenses Portal (login to your Rhino account if prompted).

  2. Click Create New Team and create a team to use for your compute project.

    Note
    Creating a new team is not strictly required, but core-hour billing is not compatible with existing licenses in the team. So if your team has licenses in it, core-hour billing will not be allowed.

  3. Click Manage Team -> Manage Core-Hour Billing.

  4. Check the checkbox next to the products you want to enable.
    Note, if you’ve had a team running for years, you may need to enable newer versions of Rhino.

  5. Click Save, and enter payment information when prompted for your new team.

Using Core-Hour Billing

  1. Go to the Licenses Portal and select the team that you just set up with Core-hour billing.

  2. Click Manage Team -> Manage Core-Hour Billing.

  3. Click Action -> Get Auth Token to get a token.

  4. Create a new environment variable with the name RHINO_TOKEN and use the token as the value. Since the token is too long for Windows' Environment Variables dialog, it’s easiest to do this via a PowerShell command.

    [System.Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable('RHINO_TOKEN', 'your token here', 'Machine')
    

From now on, when you start Rhino on this machine it will use your core-hour billing team.

Warning
Warning! This token allows anyone with it to charge your team at will. Do NOT share this token with anyone.

Single-Computer licensing Not Supported

When running on Windows Server, it is not possible to enter a license key to run as a single-computer license, as Rhino requires a license per core.