Activating a licence

What the app contacts, and what it does not

The shop is not open and there are no licence keys, so nothing activates and nothing renews. The direct-download build does check cdn.mountit.app for a newer version, a published provider catalogue and messages; the App Store build contacts nothing at all, because Apple distributes its updates. The check carries no account, no identifier and no name of anything you have connected to — the security page lists it field by field. That is not a promise about the future; it is a statement about the app as it stands, and the security page lists every host the app can reach so you can check it. Our own build fails if the licence client is ever linked into the app while these two pages still say it is not.

What follows is therefore written in the future tense on purpose: it is the design of the Mountit Pro licence system, published before it ships rather than after. When it does ship, the sentence above changes here and on /security on the same day, and the changelog records it.

Entering your key

You will open Settings › Plan › Enter licence key and paste the key from your account page or your receipt email. Keys will not be case-sensitive and the dashes will be optional — a trailing space copied out of a mail client is the single most common reason a valid key is rejected, and that is worth designing out rather than supporting.

What activation will send

Exactly three things: the licence key, a device identifier derived on your Mac, and a display name so you can recognise the machine on your account page. No file names, no connection details, no credentials, and nothing about what you mount. The security page carries the same list under “what we will contact, later”, and the two are meant to be compared.

The lease, and why it will exist

What comes back will be a signed lease, valid for 30 days. The app will verify it on your Mac against a public key compiled into the binary, so opening a volume will never consult the network. From about day 7 the app will renew it quietly in the background, at a randomised moment — roughly monthly, and never while you are waiting for a mount.

We would rather explain this than dress it up. An eternal key would make the device limit fiction: you could activate three Macs, deactivate all three — freeing the seats while those machines kept working, because nothing had revoked them — and activate three more, endlessly. The lease is what closes that.

The three-week gap between renewal and expiry is deliberate slack. Our servers will be able to be unreachable for a fortnight without you noticing. Air-gapped machines will be handled by a manual offline activation on the Enterprise tier.

Moving a licence to another Mac

How many Macs a licence covers will depend on the tier you buy; the pricing page is where that number will live. To free a seat you will open your account page or the app's own device list, find the machine and choose Deactivate. The seat becomes available immediately.

That will work whether or not you still have the machine. A Mac that has been sold, wiped or has died can be deactivated without contacting us and without a waiting period. It stops mounting when its 30-day lease next comes up for renewal, and falls back to the free tier rather than misbehaving.

There will be a rate limit on how often seats may be moved. It exists only to stop one licence being cycled through an unlimited number of machines, and it will be set well above anything ordinary use produces. If you hit it, tell us and we will lift it.

If a key is refused

• Seat limit reached — deactivate a device on your account page, or move to a tier with more.
• Unknown key — check for a trailing space, and check you are not pasting an App Store receipt, which is not a licence key.
• Refunded or revoked — the licence was cancelled. If that is a surprise, write to us; it is fixable.

The Mac App Store edition will have none of this: it is entitled through StoreKit, so Apple handles the purchase and there is no key to enter and no lease to renew. That edition has not shipped either — but when it does, nothing on this page will apply to it.