Last updated 2 October 2026
These terms cover your purchase and use of Bottleneck. Bottleneck is a trading name of PROMEC SYSTEMS LLC, a limited liability company based in Rhode Island, United States (“we”, “us”). By installing or using Bottleneck you accept them.
Orders are processed by Paddle.com Market Ltd, our authorised reseller and merchant of record. Paddle is the seller of record for your transaction: they take the payment, charge any applicable tax, and issue your invoice. Paddle’s own buyer terms apply to the transaction alongside these terms, and where the two conflict on matters of payment, tax or refunds, Paddle’s prevail.
A licence is perpetual. Once bought, the version of Bottleneck covered by it keeps working indefinitely. We grant you a non-exclusive, worldwide, non-transferable right to install and use Bottleneck according to the tier you purchased:
These allowances are terms, not technical locks. Bottleneck validates entirely offline and an offline licence can prove a tier but never a count, so we rely on you to observe them. A Technician licence covers one technician; a team of five needs five. An Enterprise site licence covers the machine allowance on its order, whatever the application displays — an estate that grows past its band moves to the next one.
Your purchase includes one year of entitlement to new versions from the date of purchase, unless stated otherwise at the time of sale. When that year ends:
An update plan is a recurring annual subscription. It costs $5 per year for Pro, $20 per year for Technician, or $99, $299 or $799 per year for Enterprise according to the site licence band, plus any applicable tax. You are charged when you start the plan, and it then renews automatically every 12 months, charging the same amount to your payment method on file, until you cancel. Each payment extends your update entitlement by one year.
You can cancel at any time from your account page at bottleneckonline.com/account, or by emailing sales@bottleneckonline.com. Cancelling means you will not be charged again. It does not affect your licence: the software keeps working, and you keep every version released during the time you paid for. Each payment is refundable within 10 days under our refund policy.
An update plan extends the entitlement of an existing licence rather than creating a new one. We establish what you already own from your purchase history with Paddle, so if you subscribe with the same email address you bought with, you do not need your original key. If you subscribe under a different address, supply your key at checkout so we can match it; otherwise a plan bought on an account with no matching licence of that tier issues nothing, and we will either put it right or refund you. An Enterprise update plan must be for the same machine band as the site licence it extends, or a larger one; a plan for a smaller band issues nothing, and we will put it right or refund it in the same way.
Nothing here restricts anything you are permitted to do by law that cannot be excluded by agreement, including any right to decompile for interoperability.
Bottleneck measures your hardware and offers an opinion about what is limiting it. That opinion is generated from benchmarks and a reference dataset of expected performance. It is diagnostic guidance, not professional advice, and you remain responsible for any purchase or configuration decision you make.
In particular: expected scores are derived from published relative performance anchored to measured hardware, not from measurements of every part in existence. Unusual configurations may sit outside the model. Bottleneck indicates where its confidence is lower, and you should treat those findings accordingly.
To the fullest extent the law allows, the software is provided as is, without warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement.
You use Bottleneck at your own risk. Its benchmarks deliberately run your processor, memory, graphics card and drives at full load, and the storage test writes a temporary file to each drive it measures. Its heat and stability check does the same to the processor, memory and, if you include it, the graphics card, for as long as you choose, up to an hour. Full load can expose a fault that was already there — an unstable overclock, inadequate cooling, a failing drive or power supply — and your computer may freeze, restart or shut down while a test or check runs. Any change you make on the strength of Bottleneck’s findings — to firmware (BIOS or UEFI) settings, memory profiles, drivers, Windows settings or hardware — and any script it generates for you to run, is made by you and at your own risk. Review such scripts, and try them on one machine, before running them across others.
The same applies to a change Bottleneck makes for you when you press a one-click fix: it is made at your request and at your own risk. Bottleneck records each such change so that you can undo it, but it cannot promise that undoing restores everything as it was. A setting that has been changed again since is left as it is.
Measuring a game reads timing information Windows already records. It does not modify the game, inject anything into it or read its memory. We do not control how a game, its publisher or its anti-cheat software treats other programs running alongside it, and we are not responsible for any action a game publisher takes against your account.
To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not responsible for any damage, loss or other problem arising from installing or using Bottleneck, from relying on its findings, or from acting on them, including damage to hardware, loss or corruption of data, system instability and downtime. Keep current backups of anything you value.
Nothing in these terms excludes or limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded, and nothing in them affects the rights you have by law as a consumer.
Subject to that, our total liability arising from your use of Bottleneck is limited to the amount you paid for your licence in the twelve months before the claim. We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for lost profits or data, or for the cost of hardware you chose to buy or not buy.
Your licence lasts indefinitely unless you materially breach these terms — most realistically by sharing a key publicly. In that case we may revoke the affected licence id. We will tell you why, and where a breach can be put right we will give you the chance to do so first.
A refund ends the licence it paid for, and so does a chargeback, unless the payment is later upheld. The licence is withdrawn automatically: your copy of Bottleneck goes back to the free version the next time it checks for updates. Continuing to use a refunded key, by keeping the application offline or turning updates off, is a breach of these terms. Refunding an update-plan payment does not end the licence it extended.
We may update these terms for future purchases. The terms that apply to your licence are the ones published when you bought it, and we will not change those retroactively to your disadvantage.
These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Rhode Island, United States, without regard to its conflict of law rules, and the state and federal courts located in Rhode Island have exclusive jurisdiction. If you buy as a consumer, this does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory consumer law where you live.
By email, at sales@bottleneckonline.com. For payment, invoicing and refund enquiries you can also contact Paddle directly at paddle.net.