meerkly

Terms of Service

Effective September 6, 2026

These terms cover the Meerkly apps and agent, the Meerkly SDK, meerkly.com, and dashboard.meerkly.com. By creating an account, running the software, or shipping the SDK inside an app of your own, you agree to them. If you do not agree, do not run it.

Who we are

Meerkly runs the network these terms describe. We publish this site, the dashboard at dashboard.meerkly.com, the apps and agent you install, and the SDK the crates and packages are built from. Your agreement is with us, and it is these terms plus the Privacy Policy — nothing else.

[email protected] is the address for anything about these terms, including a formal notice you need to give us. Questions about data go to [email protected] instead. We deal with all of it in writing.

What the service does

Meerkly routes other people’s internet traffic out through your connection. When the app is running, your device acts as an exit point on the Meerkly network: our customers’ requests travel through it and appear to come from your IP address. Your account earns for the data that passes through.

This is the part to be clear-eyed about: traffic that is not yours will originate from your IP address. We restrict what customers may do with the network — see What the network refuses below — but you should decide whether you are comfortable with that before you start.

Who may use it

• You must be at least 18 years old.
• You must own the internet connection you are sharing, or have permission from whoever does. Do not run Meerkly on an employer’s, school’s, hotel’s, or any other network you do not control.
• On a rented server, check your hosting provider’s own terms first. Some forbid running a proxy or reselling bandwidth, and that agreement is between you and them — we cannot tell you it is allowed on a plan we have never read.
• One account per person.

Your data allowance

Shared traffic counts against a metered plan like any other traffic, and Meerkly does not watch your allowance for you: there is no built-in monthly cap and no Wi-Fi-only mode today. On a capped or metered connection, run it on Wi-Fi, or leave yourself room and stop it before you get close. Any data charges are yours.

Earnings

You earn per gigabyte of data shared. The rate is measured at the gateway as the data actually moves, and applies at the time the traffic happens: each hour of usage is priced at the rate in force during that hour and then fixed. If a rate changes, or a promotional rate ends, earnings you have already accrued are not re-priced.

Rates may change, and may differ between accounts where a promotion or an individual agreement applies. Your current rate is always shown on the Earnings page in your dashboard.

Payouts

• You may request a payout once your unpaid balance reaches the published minimum, shown on your Earnings page.
• Requesting a payout claims the earnings it covers. Each payout lists exactly which hours it paid for, at which rates.
• Payments are processed separately from the request, and we may ask you to confirm your identity or provide tax information before paying.
• We may withhold or reverse a payout tied to traffic that breaks these terms.

Earnings are quoted and settled in US dollars, and they are gross: reporting and paying any tax on them is yours to do. Where the law requires it we may withhold tax, or hold a payout until you give us the information we need to pay it.

What is not allowed

• Faking, inflating, or automating traffic to generate earnings that do not reflect real usage.
• Running Meerkly on connections you do not control, or installing it on other people’s devices without their informed consent.
• Embedding a publisher ID that is not yours, or distributing an ID in a way that misattributes earnings.
• Bundling the Meerkly SDK into an app without telling your users, in plain language, that their bandwidth will be shared.
• Interfering with the network, or attempting to overload it. Reading the client is not interference: the SDK crates are open source, and what you may do with them is set by their own licences, not by this document.

We may suspend or close an account that breaks these rules, and forfeit earnings tied to the breach. We will tell you why unless the law stops us, and you can reply to [email protected] if you think we have it wrong.

What the network refuses

Customer requests are checked before they reach a device, and again on the device itself. These are mechanisms in the code that runs, not promises about how any given customer will behave:

• No mail. Mail submission ports are refused at the gateway, before a request is handed to a device. Spam relaying is the dominant abuse of a network like this one, so it is refused by default rather than by configuration, and it is not a setting anyone can turn on.
• Nothing behind your front door. The exit resolves every destination itself and refuses anything that is not a routable public address — loopback, private ranges, link-local, CGNAT, unique-local, cloud metadata. It then connects to the address it checked and never re-resolves the name, so a host cannot answer public once and private the second time.
• Every request is logged with the account behind it, the destination, and the decision taken, so traffic through the network is accountable rather than anonymous.

If you believe traffic through your connection broke these rules, tell us at [email protected] and we will investigate.

Publisher IDs

A publisher ID is a public identifier, not a secret. It ships inside apps and can be shared as a QR code. It says which account earns from the traffic; it grants no access to your dashboard, so seeing one is not a security problem. You are responsible for the traffic attributed to your IDs, and you can rotate an ID at any time if you believe it is being misused — though doing so stops every install still using the old one from earning.

The software

The apps and the agent are licensed to you, not sold: a personal, revocable licence to run them for sharing bandwidth through Meerkly. The SDK is a separate matter — its crates are published under MIT or Apache-2.0, and your rights in them come from those licences. The gateway is ours and stays closed. The Meerkly name and the mascot are ours too; nothing here gives you a right to use them.

Stopping

You can stop sharing at any time by pausing or quitting the app, and you can close your account whenever you like. Earnings already accrued and above the payout minimum remain payable to you.

Availability, and what we do not promise

The service is provided as it is and as it is available. We do not promise particular uptime, particular earnings, or that any given rate will continue — how much your device is asked to do depends on demand, and there will be quiet days. We may change or discontinue features, and we will give reasonable notice of changes that affect what you earn.

Beyond the rights your own law gives you, we make no warranties: not that the software is free of faults, not that it fits a purpose you have in mind, and not that running it will earn you any particular amount. The calculators on this site are illustrations, not offers.

Limits on our liability

We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss arising from your use of Meerkly — lost profits, lost data, or charges you chose to incur on a metered connection. For everything else, our total liability for any claim is limited to the greater of the earnings we paid you in the twelve months before it and US$100.

Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law. If you are a consumer, you keep every right your local law gives you and this section takes none of it away.

Your side of it

You are responsible for the traffic attributed to your account and your publisher IDs, and for the installs you distribute. If someone brings a claim against us because you broke these terms — you ran Meerkly on a connection you did not control, or shipped the SDK without telling your users — you cover what it reasonably costs us to deal with it. This does not apply to anything that was our fault.

Changes to these terms

We will post any change here with a new effective date, and give notice of material changes before they take effect. Continuing to run Meerkly after that means you accept the revised terms.

The rest of the agreement

If part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stands. We may transfer this agreement if Meerkly is sold or merges; you may not hand your account to somebody else. If we do not enforce something straight away, we have not given up the right to. Together with the Privacy Policy, this is the whole agreement between us about the service, and it replaces anything said before it.

Contact

Questions about these terms: [email protected].

See also our Privacy Policy, which covers what data we handle.