Activation — Klippster docs

Every licence names the Mac it runs on. That is the single design decision the rest of this page follows from: a licence file cannot exist until a specific Mac has asked for one, so what arrives in your inbox is a way to get a licence, not the licence itself.

#What the purchase email contains

Item	What it is	Lifetime
Claim link	A one-click `klippster-license://claim` link that opens Klippster and activates the Mac you clicked it on.	Single use, 14 days
Activation key	A 20-character key you type into Settings → Klippster Pro on any Mac.	Permanent, reusable

The claim link is the fast path; the activation key is the one that still works in a year. Keep the email — it is how you get the licence back at any time, and how you move it to another Mac.

If the claim link expires

Nothing is lost. Your licence page can mint a fresh one at any time, and the activation key never expires. Only one claim link is live per licence at a time — minting a new one retires the old.

#Activating a Mac that is online

On the Mac you want to use, open the claim link

From the purchase email, or from the success page right after paying. It opens Klippster — which is the point: a browser cannot say which Mac it is running on, and the app can.

Klippster registers the Mac

It derives a device code locally, sends it with the claim code, and receives a signed licence bound to that machine. Pro unlocks.

That is the last request

From then on the licence is verified on your Mac. No launch check, no schedule, no heartbeat.

The activation key route is the same thing typed by hand: Settings → Klippster Pro, paste the key, done.

#Activating a Mac with no connection

Nothing about a licence requires the Mac using it to have ever been online.

Read the device code off that Mac

Klippster shows it in Settings → Klippster Pro. It is 16 characters, displayed in groups of four: XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX.

Enter it on your licence page, from any other device

A phone works. Sign in with the address you paid with.

Download the licence file and move it across

Open it on the offline Mac and Pro unlocks there.

#About the device code

The device code is how a licence names a Mac without us ever learning which Mac it is.

It is not a serial number. It is 75 bits of a salted hash derived from a macOS hardware identifier. We never receive or store your Mac's serial number, and the code is not reversible.
It is built to be read aloud. The alphabet is Crockford base32, which has no I, L, O or U — so 1 and I, or 0 and O, cannot be confused. Typing a lower-case letter, or the wrong one of those pairs, is corrected automatically.
It carries a check symbol. A mistyped code is rejected as malformed rather than looked up and reported as unknown, which is a much more useful error.

#Seats

A licence covers a fixed number of Macs: three on Personal, ten on Family. A seat is taken when a Mac activates, and released when you release it.

Personal licence · 3 seats

  MacBook Pro    ●  bound    2026-03-14
  iMac           ●  bound    2026-04-02
  Mac mini       ○  free

  Re-activating an already-bound Mac takes no second seat.

Re-activating the same Mac is free and idempotent. If a connection drops mid-activation and you try again, you get the byte-identical licence back and the seat count does not move. This is deliberately the ordinary case rather than an error path.

#When the seats are full

Activation fails with a message saying the licence is already active on all of its Macs. That is a solved problem, not a dead end: release a Mac you are no longer using from your licence page, then activate the new one.

Releases are self-service and rate-limited to four per year per licence — enough for genuine machine changes, and not enough to run a licence as a rotating pool. If you need more than that because of a real situation, support can do it.

Releasing needs a signed-in session

The permanent link in your purchase email deliberately cannot release a Mac. It can fetch your licence and mint a claim code, and that is all — so an email forwarded years ago cannot knock somebody's Macs offline. Releasing requires signing in.

#Moving a licence to a new Mac

Release the old Mac

On your licence page, under the list of registered Macs. Do this before you wipe the machine if you can — releasing does not require the Mac to be present, but it is easier to identify when you can still read its label.

Activate the new one

Claim link, activation key, or the offline device-code route. Any of them.

You do not need to contact us for this, and there is no cooling-off period between the two steps.

#Revocation

A licence can stop working in exactly two situations, and neither of them is automatic.

A refund or a chargeback makes a licence a candidate for revocation, never an automatic one. A partial refund, or a chargeback that we go on to win, must not silently disable somebody's app — so a person decides, and the decision is recorded with a reason.

The second is your own erasure request, which ends the licence by design.

Revocations are published as a signed list that the app checks when it updates. If that list is missing, stale or unverifiable, the app honours the licence: a revocation check that fails closed can take Pro away from paying customers on a bad deploy, while one that fails open costs us a revoked licence working for one more update cycle. That is not a close call.

#If activation fails

What you see	What it means	What to do
That device code is not valid	The code was mistyped — the check symbol did not match.	Re-read it from Settings. Case and hyphens do not matter.
We could not find that licence	Unknown activation key, or a claim link already used or older than 14 days.	Use the activation key from the email, or mint a fresh link from your licence page.
Already active on all of its Macs	Every seat is taken.	Release one from your licence page, then retry.
This licence is no longer active	It was revoked.	Contact support.

The exact status codes and error strings behind these are in the API reference.