What €69 once actually buys you

The price appears in three places on this site: €69, once, every update included. That is easy to print and cheap to mean nothing. This page is the licence behind it, written out, including the two places where it is narrower than the slogan.

Every update, including the big ones

There is no version 2.0 that re-bills you. No upgrade fee for a major release, no "maintenance year" that lapses and freezes your app at the version you happened to buy.

This is the one promise here that is policy rather than mechanism. Nothing in the code stops a future me from shipping a paid upgrade — the same way nothing stops any company from changing its terms. What I can tell you is that the alternative was considered and rejected on the record, in The arithmetic of selling software once. Rogue Amoeba charges roughly 40 to 50 per cent for a major version and is entirely honest about it. I am not doing that, because "yours forever" has to survive the day after a major release or it was never worth writing down.

Two devices

One key activates yapyap on two machines. A laptop and a desktop, or a work machine and a home one. That limit is enforced by Polar, who handle the purchase, not by something I can quietly tighten later without you noticing.

Try a third and the third goes read-only rather than stealing a slot from one of the other two.

The first week needs nothing from you

A fresh install is fully usable for seven days with no key, no email address, no account and no network connection at all. Not a crippled demo — the whole application.

That week is measured on your own machine from the moment the app first ran. There is no trial product, no checkout to click through first, and nothing about the free week involves a payment provider. You can be offline for the entire seven days and it works exactly the same.

You are told about the seven days once, during onboarding. From day four the app shows a quiet indicator. That is the whole of the nagging.

When the licence cannot be checked

Here is the part most pages like this leave out.

Once you have activated, yapyap runs for fourteen days without successfully reaching the licence server. Inside that window it does not care whether you are online. Past it, the app asks to check again before it will take in any new material.

So the honest version of "no subscription" is this: the app is never billed twice, and it never asks for money again. But an activated copy does need to confirm its licence roughly once a fortnight to keep recording. If you spend three weeks somewhere without a connection, you will come back to an app that wants a moment online before it records again.

I would rather state that plainly than let you discover it on a boat.

Read-only is not locked

When a licence cannot be confirmed — the free week ran out, the fortnight lapsed, a key was refunded, a third machine — the app does not lock you out. It goes read-only.

What that means precisely: your library, playback, every transcript, search across all of it, and export stay open in every one of those states. What stops is bringing new material in — recording, importing, dictation, re-transcription, write-ups, and accepting a handoff from your phone.

Including the refund case, deliberately. Someone who buys yapyap, uses it for a month and takes their money back keeps a read-only application forever, with their recordings and their exports intact. That is a real cost and I accepted it knowingly, because the alternative is holding somebody's own recordings hostage over a payment dispute. Your archive is yours. It stops being about the licence the moment it is on your disk.

The refusal is one rule enforced in the Rust core, not a check the interface performs. A UI-level gate is a gate that anybody can delete, and it also has a habit of forgetting the paths that do not look like recording — import, phone sync, re-transcription. Those are exactly the ones a screen-derived list misses.

What this licence is not

It is not source code. yapyap is closed today, and the pledge to publish it if I stop is a stated intention rather than a legal instrument — no escrow, no trustee, no clause that fires automatically. That is written out honestly elsewhere, including who should buy something else instead.

It is not a support contract, and it is not a promise that every feature you want will arrive.

It is this: you paid once, the app is yours on two machines, every update is included, and nothing anyone does later can reach into your computer and take your recordings away.