The terms, written to be read rather than clicked past.

Who you are dealing with

Red Kite is made and published by Easy2pc Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales, company number 05706163, registered office Unit 5 Cunliffe Drive, Kettering, Northamptonshire, NN16 8LD. Where this page says “we” it means that company.

We do not host or monitor anything for anybody. You run the hub on a server you choose and it answers to you. There is no account with us, nothing phones home for permission, and if we disappeared tomorrow your hub would carry on until you turned it off. Anywhere on this site that says “we have not heard from this machine” is the hub’s own voice talking to you, not ours.

Free while in beta

Red Kite is free while it is in beta. No subscription, no card, no per-agent fee, no per-endpoint fee, no per-sensor fee and no per-technician licence. Watch one machine or eighty.

The only thing it costs to run is hosting the hub, roughly £6 to £20 a month, and that goes to whichever hosting company you choose. We take no part of it.

It will probably not be free for ever. If a price is ever introduced we will say so on this site in advance, and anything you have already installed keeps running. There is no licence check to fail, because there is no licence check, and we will not add one to a version published while it was free. Those two sentences are promises about our future conduct and we intend to be held to them.

What you may do with it

Red Kite is two things under two licences, and the split is deliberate.

• The agent is open source. Everything that runs on your own machines is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. Read it, audit it, change it, redistribute it, build it into something of your own, and keep running it whatever happens to us. The only thing withheld is the name: call a fork something else.
• The hub is source-available, and not open source. We publish the full source so you can read and audit and modify it, and you may run it on as many machines as you like, commercially, including machines you look after for customers. You may charge for that work and give those customers accounts to see their own machines. What is reserved is redistribution: you may not repackage it, sell it, or offer it to third parties as a monitoring product or service in its own right.

The full text of both is in the software itself, and the licence in the repository is what governs if this summary and it ever disagree.

No warranty, and what that means

Red Kite is provided as-is, with no warranty of any kind. It is beta software. It may fail to notice a problem, fail to tell you about one, tell you late, or tell you about something that turns out to be fine. It depends on your network, your internet connection, and on email, text message and push providers that none of us control.

We do not promise that it will be available, that it will detect any particular thing, that any alert will arrive, or that any fault will be fixed. We are not obliged to provide support or updates, and we may stop publishing it.

What it must not be used for

Red Kite reports that a machine has stopped sending messages. It cannot tell you why, and it is not a safety, security, alarm, medical or life-safety system. You must not use it:

• as the only or main way of finding out that a machine, system or service has failed;
• instead of backups, or as a way of proving a backup could be restored;
• anywhere a missed, late or wrong alert could contribute to death, injury, or damage to property or the environment. That includes medical devices or care, life support, emergency dispatch, aviation, vehicle or vessel control, industrial or process control, and nuclear facilities.

If you need monitoring for any of those, this is the wrong tool and you should buy one warranted for it.

What we ask of you

The beta is an exchange, and this is our half of it in writing: working software, given away, in return for hearing what it gets wrong on machines that are not ours.

That is a request, not a condition. Nothing happens if you ignore it, except that the risk is yours.

Your details

If you fill in the beta form we keep your name, your email address and the four answers on it. We use them to reply and to send the occasional note about the beta. They are not sold, shared, or sent to a mailing-list provider, and they sit in the same database as the rest of the hub, on a server we run. Ask us to remove you and we will delete the row rather than mark it hidden. No form, no sign-in, no reason needed.

An ordinary signup records no IP address. The one exception is a submission that looks like an attempt to put code into the form: we record the address it came from, the time, and a short excerpt of what was sent, because three of those block the connection and a block has to know what it is blocking. Blocks lapse on their own, and you are told each time with a count of the attempts you have left. Details of that are on the beta page.

Red Kite itself sends us nothing. The hub you run is yours, the check-ins go to it and not to us, and we never see the machines you are watching.

Using the signup form

The form is open to anybody, which means it gets the treatment open things get. Please do not use it to send code, to probe the hub, or to sign up somebody who has not asked to be signed up.

Submissions that look like an attempt at injection are refused and counted, and three from one connection blocks it for a period. If we have read something the wrong way, that is our mistake and we will lift it: write to contact@redkite.info and a person will sort it out. Somebody describing their own database in a note is the likeliest person to meet that screen, and we would rather hear from you than lose you to it.

Liability

Nothing here limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. If you are a consumer, nothing here affects your statutory rights.

Beyond that, and because this is beta software given away for nothing: we are not liable for lost profit, lost revenue, lost business, lost or corrupted data, lost goodwill, downtime, wasted time, or any loss arising from Red Kite failing to detect, record, report or alert on anything, or doing so late or wrongly. Our total liability is limited to one hundred pounds.

That allocation is the reason the software is free and the reason we ask you not to rely on it alone. You are far better placed than we are to protect yourself against those losses, by keeping the monitoring you already have.

If you use Red Kite in a business to look after machines for other people, the arrangement between you and them is yours to make. These terms are between you and us and cannot change what you have agreed with somebody else.

Changes and endings

We may change these terms. The version on this page is the current one, and material changes will be said plainly on the site rather than slipped in. Changes do not reach backwards into what you have already installed.

You can stop using Red Kite whenever you like: turn off the agents, turn off the hub, and there is nothing to cancel and nobody to tell. If you want your details removed, write to us.

Law, and telling us

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.

contact@redkite.info reaches an engineer rather than a ticket queue. Reports of things Red Kite got wrong are the point of the beta and are more welcome than praise.

Last updated 12 September 2026.