Terms of Service

Kernelry is an interview practice tool built to help engineers prepare for production on-call, systems debugging, and technical interviews. It is operated by Kernelry LLC, a limited liability company formed in Illinois, United States, with its business address at 111 N Wabash Ave, Ste 100 #3409, Chicago, IL 60602.

Kernelry LLC ("we", "us") is the party you contract with. These terms are the agreement between you and us. By creating an account or using Kernelry, you agree to them.

Accounts and access

You sign in with Google or with an email address and password. Accounts are strictly personal, not organizational. You must be an individual at least 18 years old, or the age of majority where you live if that is higher, to create an account.

Each account is for a single person. You may not share your account, transfer credentials, or let others access the service through your login.

Both the free and paid plans have daily limits, for example on new questions, interviews, and AI evaluations, and the paid plan's are substantially higher. These limits reset daily. They exist to keep the service responsive for everyone and to protect the question bank from bulk extraction.

The free plan costs nothing, and we may change its limits or features, or stop offering it, at any time. We may also adjust the paid plan's limits over time. If we reduce what the paid plan includes in a way that matters to you, we will tell you before the change takes effect, and you can cancel and receive a prorated refund for the unused part of your billing period.

Sanctions and export compliance: Kernelry is available globally, but you may not use the service if you are located in, or ordinarily resident in, any country or territory subject to comprehensive trade or economic sanctions imposed by the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, or the United Nations, or if you are designated on any restricted-party list maintained by the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, or the United Nations. You may not access Kernelry if doing so would violate applicable trade or economic sanctions laws.

Paid plans and billing

Kernelry offers an optional paid Pro plan, billed monthly or annually. Current prices are shown on the pricing page, and the price shown at checkout is what you pay for your first billing period and each renewal, until it changes as described below. Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each billing period unless canceled prior to the renewal date.

Payments are handled by Stripe Managed Payments, under which Sold through Link, LLC (a Stripe company) is the merchant of record and the legal seller for the transaction. Link takes your payment, is responsible for calculating and remitting applicable sales tax or VAT, and manages refunds and payment disputes. Your card or bank statement will show a charge from LINK.COM followed by our business name. Kernelry provides the software and service; Link handles the financial transaction.

Stripe holds and processes all credit card and payment information. Kernelry never sees, receives, or stores your card details.

Prices on the pricing page are shown in US dollars. Any sales tax or VAT that applies where you live is determined and shown at checkout before you pay, so the total you confirm is the total you are charged.

If we change the price of your subscription, we will email you at least 30 days before your first renewal at the new price, with the new price and how to cancel. If you cancel before that renewal, you are never charged the new price.

Failed renewals and non-payment: If a renewal payment fails (for example, if a card expires or has insufficient funds), Stripe will attempt to process the payment according to standard retry schedules. If the payment cannot be completed, your account will automatically revert to the free tier at the end of the current billing cycle. Your account, interview summaries, notes, and saved data are retained - interview questions, answers, and feedback follow the same 90-day retention as every account, described in our Privacy Policy - and there are no penalties, late fees, or interest charges. You can restore Pro access at any time by adding a valid payment method.

Acceptable use

We provide realistic practice scenarios and the AI that grades them. In return, you agree to use the service in good faith and follow these rules:

• No competing use or question harvesting: You may not use questions, scenario prompts, grading rubrics, sample answers, explanations, or AI output from Kernelry to train, fine-tune, or evaluate any machine-learning model or artificial intelligence system; to build, operate, or improve a competing product or service; or to compile, publish, or distribute a collection of our questions, answers, or explanations, beyond notes kept for your own study. This applies however the material is collected, including automated scraping, scripted queries, and manual copying or transcribing, and wherever it ends up, including public posts and repositories.
• No AI grader manipulation: You may not attempt to manipulate, jailbreak, prompt-inject, or extract the underlying system prompts or instructions of the AI grader.
• No automated or scripted access: You may not access Kernelry or its APIs using automated bots, crawlers, scrapers, or custom scripts. All interaction must be through the standard web interface. Assistive technology, such as screen readers and browser translation, is welcome.
• No account sharing: You may not share, sell, or rent your account or session access to anyone else.
• No limit evasion: You may not open extra accounts, or use any other means, to get around daily limits, a cooldown, a suspension, or an account we closed.
• Lab environment safety: When hands-on lab environments are active, they provide a real, sandboxed Linux and Kubernetes environment. You may not use these sandboxes to attack external systems, scan networks, distribute malware, host unauthorized services, or mine cryptocurrency.
• No confidential or credential data: Answers and helper messages are sent to a third-party AI model for evaluation. Do not paste real credentials, API keys, private keys, customer data, or your employer's confidential incident reports, logs, or source code into Kernelry. Practise with realistic scenarios, not real secrets.
• No refund abuse: You may not repeatedly obtain refunds for subscriptions you have used, or open new accounts to do so. Requesting a refund in good faith, and exercising a statutory withdrawal right, are never abuse; a pattern of taking the money back while continuing to use the service is.
• No abusive or unlawful content: You may not submit illegal, defamatory, harassing, hateful, or abusive content in interview responses, notes, or communications.
• Security research: If you find a security problem, report it through our Contact page and give us reasonable time to fix it before telling anyone else. Do not access other people's data, degrade the service, or test beyond what is needed to show the problem. We do not run a paid bug bounty.

Suspension, termination, and wind-down

We reserve the right to temporarily pause or permanently close any account that violates our acceptable use rules, including immediately and without prior notice when abuse or an infrastructure threat is ongoing.

To protect our systems, some enforcement is automatic: for example, repeated refused submissions (such as prompt injection attempts or abusive content) trigger an automated temporary cooldown. However, any permanent account suspension or closure is always reviewed and decided by a human operator.

If you believe your account was suspended or paused by mistake, you can appeal via our Contact page. A real person will review your appeal and respond.

Refusing future service: Where we close an account for breach of these terms, we may also decline to serve you in future and refuse new accounts or subscriptions from you. To enforce that, and only for that, we keep a limited record of the identifiers connected to the closed account, as described in our Privacy Policy. Apart from the sanctions rules above, this is never based on your nationality or country of residence.

Termination for convenience and service wind-down: We may discontinue the service or terminate an account that has not violated these terms by providing reasonable advance notice. If we close your account for convenience or discontinue the service before the end of your prepaid subscription term, we will issue a prorated refund through Stripe for the unused prepaid portion of that billing period.

Cancellation, refunds, and payment disputes

You can cancel your subscription at any time via the self-serve Stripe billing portal. Cancellation stops future billing, and your Pro access will continue until the end of your current paid billing period. We do not ourselves offer automatic refunds or prorated credits for the remaining time when you choose to cancel mid-cycle.

Refunds are decided by Link: because Link is the merchant of record, refunds are requested from Link support, which decides them under its own policy and returns the money to the payment method you used. Link can issue a refund within 60 days of a transaction whatever this agreement says, so nothing here limits what you can ask Link for. You are also welcome to raise a billing question with us through our Contact page, and we will help, but we do not control Link's decision.

Where an account is suspended or terminated for cause (such as abuse, fraud, or violation of these terms), we will not ourselves ask Link to refund the unused remainder of a subscription. An automatic refund on suspension would let someone buy a year, use a month, get themselves banned and take the rest back.

Chargebacks and dispute resolution: If you notice an unrecognized charge or have an issue with billing, please contact us through our Contact page before initiating a chargeback or dispute with your bank or card issuer. We are glad to work through legitimate mistakes and issue refunds where appropriate, and reaching us directly is almost always faster than a bank dispute. Because Link is the merchant of record, formal chargebacks are adjudicated by Link and the payment networks under their own rules, and nothing here affects your right to dispute a charge with your card issuer.

EU and UK statutory cooling-off rights: If you are a consumer residing in the European Union or the United Kingdom, you have a statutory 14-day right to withdraw from a purchase without giving a reason, and nothing in these terms takes that away. Because access begins the moment you subscribe, by accepting these terms at checkout you expressly request immediate access to the service and acknowledge that starting straight away reduces what you can claim back if you withdraw. To withdraw, contact Link support, which is the merchant of record for your purchase and handles withdrawals and the refund that follows. You can also tell us through our Contact page and we will point you there. Where you withdraw after access has begun, the amount refunded may be reduced in proportion to the period you already had access.

AI output and grading disclaimer

Kernelry relies on artificial intelligence models (primarily Google Gemini) to evaluate answers and write feedback.

AI grading is automated and imperfect. The grader can misinterpret answers, grade too harshly or too leniently, hallucinate facts, or provide out-of-date technical explanations. AI feedback is provided solely for practice and personal study, and does not constitute professional, legal, or career advice.

In particular, commands, configuration, and troubleshooting steps produced or endorsed by the grader are written for practice scenarios and are not reviewed for your environment. Never run them against a real production system without understanding and verifying them yourself.

No employment or interview guarantees

Kernelry is an interview practice and study tool. We make no promise or guarantee that practicing here will result in passing any job interview, receiving an offer, or achieving any specific career outcome.

Interview formats, technical expectations, and best practices vary widely across companies, and our question bank and grading rubric reflect specific perspectives that may differ from those of your prospective employers.

Scores are for practice only: scores and feedback are for your own study. They are not a certification or a qualification, and must not be used by anyone to screen, rank, or make decisions about job candidates or employees.

Service availability, feature changes, and upcoming features

Kernelry is operated by a single person on a best-effort basis. We do not provide a guaranteed uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA).

The service may occasionally experience downtime, slowdowns, scheduled maintenance, or unscheduled outages. We may also modify, replace, or retire specific drills, questions, question categories, AI models, or platform features as the product evolves.

Upcoming features and roadmap disclaimer: Hands-on terminal and Kubernetes labs, along with any other features described on our site or roadmap as "coming soon" or planned, are in active development and are not currently available to general subscribers. Our public roadmap and preview notices reflect our development intentions, not binding contractual commitments. Planned features may be delayed, altered in scope, or dropped entirely. A paid subscription purchases access to the features, drills, and functionality that are live and operational on Kernelry today, not to any future or unreleased capability.

User content and intellectual property

You retain full ownership of the answers, text, and notes you submit to Kernelry.

You grant Kernelry a limited, non-exclusive, worldwide licence to process, store, and display your submitted content only to provide and secure the service and to check and improve the quality of our questions and grading - such as evaluating your answers with AI, saving your progress, displaying your interview history, and reviewing a grade that looks wrong. We never publish your answers, and we never use them to train AI models.

Consistent with our Privacy Policy, if our automated grader refuses a submission because it does not answer the question, attempts to manipulate the grader, or contains abusive material, we retain a short excerpt capped at 500 characters together with your account identifier. This excerpt is accessible only to the administrator to review false positives or act on repeated misuse, is never shared with other users, and is deleted automatically after 30 days.

Feedback and suggestions: If you send us an idea, feature request, or suggestion, we may use it freely, for any purpose, without obligation, attribution, or payment to you. This does not affect your ownership of the answers and notes you submit, which the paragraphs above cover.

How our study material is made: Our questions, model answers, explanations, and mentor notes are developed with AI assistance and reviewed, corrected, and curated by us. They are written for interview practice and for staying sharp on the job: they may contain errors, simplify real systems, or go out of date as technology changes. Treat them as study material, not as authoritative documentation, and never as a substitute for your own vendor documentation, runbooks, or professional judgement.

Third-party trademarks: Product, company, and technology names used on Kernelry, including those of cloud providers and open-source projects, are the trademarks of their respective owners. Their use here is for identification and educational purposes only and does not imply any affiliation with, sponsorship by, or endorsement from those owners.

Copyright complaints: If you believe material on Kernelry infringes your copyright, tell us through our Contact page with enough detail to find it: what the material is, where it appears, what it copies, and how to reach you. We will review it and remove anything infringing. Accounts that repeatedly submit infringing material are closed.

All original questions, scenario designs, grading rubrics, mentor notes, software, UI design, and branding on Kernelry are the proprietary intellectual property of Kernelry LLC and are protected by applicable copyright and trade secret laws. We grant you a personal, limited, revocable, non-exclusive, and non-transferable licence to access and view this content solely for your own private, individual study. You may not copy, republish, license, distribute, or create derivative works from our content except as expressly permitted by these terms.

Indemnification

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, you agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless Kernelry LLC from and against any third-party claims, liabilities, damages, losses, costs, and reasonable legal expenses arising out of or related to: (a) your breach of these terms or violation of our acceptable use rules; (b) any content or submissions you provide; (c) your violation of any third-party rights or applicable laws; or (d) any harmful, abusive, or unauthorized network activity originating from your account or session, including within any sandboxed lab environment.

This indemnification does not apply to claims resulting from Kernelry LLC's own gross negligence, intentional misconduct, or material breach of these terms. If you are a consumer in the EU, UK, or other jurisdiction with statutory consumer protections restricting consumer indemnities, this clause applies only to the extent permitted by your mandatory local law.

Warranty disclaimer and limitation of liability

Kernelry is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, whether express, implied, or statutory, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement, to the extent permitted by law.

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, in no event will Kernelry LLC be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or any loss of profits, revenue, data, goodwill, or employment opportunities arising out of or related to your use of the service.

Except for liabilities that cannot lawfully be limited, the total aggregate liability of Kernelry LLC for all claims arising out of or relating to these terms or the service is strictly limited to the greater of (a) the total amount you paid for Kernelry, including through our payment provider, during the twelve (12) months preceding the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) one hundred US dollars (US$100).

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes liability that cannot be excluded under applicable law, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for intentional misconduct or gross negligence.

General provisions

Entire agreement: These terms, together with any pricing terms confirmed during checkout, constitute the complete and exclusive agreement between you and Kernelry regarding the service, superseding all prior oral or written agreements or communications. Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle personal data.

Severability: If any provision of these terms is held by a court of competent jurisdiction to be invalid, illegal, or unenforceable, that provision will be modified to the minimum extent necessary to make it enforceable (or severed if modification is not possible), and the remaining provisions will continue in full force and effect.

No waiver: Our failure or delay in exercising any right, power, or privilege under these terms will not operate as a waiver of that right or privilege, nor will any single or partial exercise preclude any other or further exercise.

Assignment: You may not assign, transfer, or delegate your account or any of your rights or obligations under these terms without our prior written consent. We may assign our rights and obligations under these terms in connection with a merger, acquisition, corporate reorganization, or sale of the assets of Kernelry, or upon reasonable advance notice to you.

Survival: Any terms that by their nature should survive termination will continue in effect, including sections on intellectual property, restrictions on competing use, disclaimers, limitations of liability, indemnification, governing law, and these general provisions.

Notices: We may send you notices by email to the address on your account, or by posting them on Kernelry. A notice sent either way counts as written notice.

Force majeure: Neither party will be liable for any failure or delay in performing obligations (other than payment obligations) due to events beyond reasonable control, including natural disasters, telecommunications or internet infrastructure failures, cloud service outages, power disruptions, strikes, armed conflicts, or acts of government.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as the product evolves, and we'll update the "last updated" date below when we do. If a change is material - for example to pricing, refunds, liability, or how we use your data - we will give at least 14 days' notice by email or on the site before it takes effect. If you don't agree, you can cancel before then; continuing to use Kernelry after the change takes effect means you accept it.

Governing law

These terms and any disputes arising out of or related to them or the service are governed by the laws of the State of Illinois, United States, without regard to its conflict of law principles. Any legal action or proceeding related to these terms shall be brought in the state or federal courts located in Cook County, Illinois.

Before either of us files a claim, the one with the complaint will first describe it to the other, you through our Contact page and we by email, and give the other 30 days to try to resolve it. Either of us may instead bring a claim in a small claims court that has jurisdiction over it.

If you are a consumer, this does not take away the protections of the law where you live. Where the mandatory consumer law of your own country or state gives you rights that these terms cannot override - including the withdrawal rights described above - those rights still apply, and you may still be able to bring a claim where you live.

Contact, support, and appeals

If you have questions about these terms, billing issues, or wish to appeal an account suspension, please reach out through our Contact page. Support is handled directly by us, and a human will read your message.

We aim to reply to support tickets and contact messages within one to two business days. This is a target, not a guarantee: replies can take longer at busy times, over weekends and holidays, or when a question needs investigation. Data requests under our Privacy Policy are answered within the timeframe stated there.