How the License Works: No Account, No Sign-Up, Three Devices

Nobody asks for your email address to sell you a desktop app. That was standard once. Now it is the thing you notice, and if you have tried to cancel a subscription in the last two years, it is also the thing you do not believe.

So here is the whole licence system, in the order you meet it: what happens at checkout, where the key comes from, the four moves that activate it, every moment the app touches the network, and the parts of this design that are worse for you than a login would have been.

You buy from Dodo Payments, and I never see your card

The short version: Dodo Payments, Inc. (USA) is the merchant of record, so your name, email and payment details go to Dodo at checkout, not to me. The seller on the receipt is Lumi Zone Lukasz Blania, Katowice, Poland.

Merchant of record is a legal role. Dodo takes the payment, handles the tax, and issues the receipt, which is why their name sits next to mine on it.

What does not happen: no form on this site asks you to invent a password, and there is no account table anywhere in the product for one to live in. No cloud backend of mine sits behind the app. No telemetry.

What Dodo keeps afterwards is narrow and it is written down in the privacy policy: the licence record with your name, email and order details, held for the life of the licence plus six years, because Polish accounting law asks for that. Your conversations never go near them, or anyone, as long as you stay local.

The key is the only credential, and it lives on your disk

The short version: Dodo emails the receipt with your licence key. The app stores that key locally in its own database, next to an activation id, a lifetime timestamp and a hardware-bound integrity tag.

One detail is worth knowing, because it decides what someone could ever do with a copy of the binary. The Dodo endpoints the app calls are unauthenticated. The key string itself is the credential, and no bearer token ships inside the app. A bearer token would be a master key: extract it once and you could query licence records for every customer. There is nothing like that in there to extract.

The flip side of it shows up twice later in this post. Anything the app would need a credential to read, it simply cannot read.

Redeeming takes about three seconds and four moves

The short version: Settings, License, paste the key, Redeem. The app answers with Active plus Lifetime in roughly three seconds, and this is the only step that has to happen online.

1. Open Settings.
2. Choose the License tab.
3. Paste the key from the Dodo email.
4. Press Redeem.

Under that button the app makes one validate call and one activate call to Dodo, with a 20 second timeout. When both come back clean it writes the licence row locally and the paywall is gone.

If the calls fail, nothing half-written is left behind and you can press the button again. If you are offline at that moment, this is the step that will not work. It is one of the real costs of the design, so it is listed again at the end.

Everything the app talks to, and when

The short version: One check at redeem, one when you deactivate a device, and a boot-time fallback only if the local integrity tag is missing. Nothing periodic, nothing in the background, no phone-home.

The complete list:

• Redeem: one validate plus activate call, 20 second timeout.
• Deactivate this device: one call, which frees the slot.
• App start, only when the local integrity tag is absent: one fallback check. On a normal install this never fires.
• Updates: manual, triggered by you. On macOS, Settings, General, Check for Updates. On Windows, the installer comes from this site.
• Cloud chat, image and voice providers: only the ones you add yourself, with keys that live in the operating system keychain.

There is no recurring background revalidation, and the periodic revalidator that once existed is switched off. The privacy page states the same thing in the same words, deliberately.

Then there is refunds, which is the awkward part. A refunded key is handled on the merchant side and the app does not poll to find out, so an install that already activated can keep running until it re-redeems or a device deactivates. That is a hole, and it is exactly what never asking the network anything buys you. The check that would catch refunds is also the check that would catch you using your own computer.

Three devices per key, and the app cannot show you a counter

The short version: Up to 3 machines per key. The app cannot read your activation count from Dodo, because there is no bearer token to read it with, so it does not display one.

Three is the number, and here is where it comes from. Most people own a laptop and a desktop, and a third covers an old machine or a work one. Whether you are using one slot or three right now, the app will not tell you. Showing a live count would take an authenticated endpoint and a shipped admin credential, and I chose an invisible counter over a master key sitting in a binary you downloaded.

Your own count is the number of machines you installed it on. The app has no way to ask Dodo what that number is.

Moving to a new machine is two steps, in that order

The short version: On the old machine, Settings, License, Deactivate this device, which frees the slot. Then install on the new machine and redeem the same key.

The order carries more weight than it should. Deactivate before you wipe, sell or hand the old machine to someone else. An activation you cannot release stays used, and if the disk goes first, the slot is held by a machine that no longer exists.

This is the one place the system bites people who are careful about their privacy and less careful about sequence. Land there anyway and an email sorts it out by hand: same key, same licence, no second purchase.

Seven days first, 20 dollars once, updates included

The short version: The trial runs 7 days with everything available and no card. Once it expires, chat, image generation, voice and dictation sit behind the paywall while export still works. The licence is 20 dollars one-time, lifetime, with every future update included.

The in-app paywall and the pricing page both show 20 dollars today. If you find 25 or 35 dollars somewhere in older files, those numbers are dead.

Two honest notes about the trial. Trial installs do not receive app updates, so the free week is not a free ride on the current build. And the trial record lives in the app’s data folder, which means wiping that folder starts a fresh 7 days. That is a hole rather than a feature, and I would rather say it exists than pretend the clock is enforced somewhere I cannot see.

Updates cost nothing, forever, and the yearly renewal tier was removed in July 2026. The long version of why, and what I do pay for instead, is in this post. Delivery is manual, as listed above, and the app does not quietly update itself. If you have not used it yet, the feature tour is the longer answer on what those 20 dollars buy, and the itch.io route exists for people who prefer to buy there.

The three things an account would do better

The short version: No self-service portal, a lost key needs an email, and the redeem step wants one working connection.

1. There is no portal. Dodo’s customer portal returns 403 for these products, so the button was removed from the app rather than left there to fail. Nowhere exists for you to log in and look at your licence.
2. A lost key means an email. Write to contact@localwaifu.com and it gets found in the Dodo dashboard by hand. It works, and it is slower than a reset link because it depends on a person reading the message.
3. Redeeming needs one working connection. Validate and activate go out to Dodo with a 20 second timeout, so a machine that has never been online cannot be licensed. A phone hotspot for a minute is enough, and after that the network is not part of licensing.

That is the trade, stated plainly. After the first redeem the licence gate reads local rows and nothing else, so the machine you are sitting at keeps opening for you with the router unplugged.

Questions people ask

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