Licensing

Getting a key into the application — online, offline, and what binds an activation to one machine — is in Install and activate. This page is about what a licence lets you do, how long it lasts, and the two mechanisms that surprise people on show day: the Show Pass, which starts itself the first time you go live, and the offline grace period, which ends without asking.

Three plans

	Demo	Editor	Runner
Build and edit a show	Yes	Yes	Yes
Play the timeline, rehearse in Standby	Yes	Yes	Yes
Connect a mixer, MIDI, OSC, web tally	Yes	Yes	Yes
Save a project	No	Yes	Yes
Export PDF, EDL, CSV	No	Yes	Yes
GO LIVE	No	No	Yes

Two things are worth reading off that table.

Demo is a real working application, minus persistence. Everything you build is real and nothing survives the session. A new project in Demo does not even ask you where to put a file: it stays in memory, silently, and the window title carries [DEMO]. Saving and exporting answer with:

License Required — An Editor or Runner license is required to save projects. Visit hotpunch.app to purchase a license.

Closing a project with unsaved work in Demo asks Discard Changes?, not "Save Changes?". There is no path from Demo to a file.

Editor cannot go live. It is the plan for the person who builds the show and hands over the cue sheets. GO LIVE is greyed out and its tooltip reads Runner license required to GO LIVE.

A backup machine needs a Runner licence of its own

A takeover is a transition to Live, so it runs the same check. A backup running Demo or Editor will latch the failover and then fail to drive anything — the worst possible outcome, because nobody is driving and the primary has already stepped aside. Check it before the show: Redundancy. A Demo machine also cannot save, which makes it useless as a backup for a second reason.

Nothing else is gated. There is no licence check when a project opens, none on the mixer connection, none on redundancy.

How a licence is billed, and how long it lasts

Billing	Shown as	Expires
Monthly	`Monthly subscription`	On the renewal date
Yearly	`Yearly subscription`	On the renewal date
Show Pass 48h / 72h / 96h	`Show Pass (48h)` and so on	A fixed number of hours after the first GO LIVE
Perpetual	`Perpetual license`	Never — the License page shows no validity row at all

When a subscription lapses, there is a short billing grace during which everything keeps working and the title bar reads [RUNNER - RENEW]: 72 hours for monthly, 7 days for yearly. A Show Pass has none — when its window closes, it closes.

If the licence carries auto-renew, it keeps its plan past the renewal date for as long as the offline grace period below still holds, so a card that clears late does not stop a show.

The Show Pass

A Show Pass is a fixed window of full Runner capability, bought for one production. The part that catches people is when the clock starts.

It does not start when you buy it, when you activate it, or when you open the project. It starts the moment you first enter Live, and it cannot be paused. Until then the pass is unstarted: you can build, save, export and rehearse in Standby for as long as you like, and the License page shows

Status: Not started - begins on GO LIVE · Duration: 72h

The first GO LIVE is refused on purpose

Because the first GO LIVE spends something irreversible, HotPunch makes you confirm it — and the way it does that looks exactly like a broken button if you have not read this.

You press GO LIVE (twice, because of the normal arm-to-confirm countdown) and nothing goes live. A warning appears:

Cannot Go Live — Going Live will START your Show Pass - confirm first
Behind or beside it, a second dialog:

Start Show Pass? — Going LIVE will START your Show Pass: its validity window begins at that moment and cannot be paused. Arm the pass now, then press GO LIVE again.

Arm Show Pass Cancel
Press Arm Show Pass. A toast confirms: Show Pass armed - the next GO LIVE will start it. Nothing has been spent yet.
Press GO LIVE again — the full arm-to-confirm, twice — and this time you go live. That is the moment the window opens.

You are asked once per run of the application. After arming, the rest of the evening behaves normally, including leaving and re-entering Live: resuming from Break never re-starts a pass.

This guard applies to every route into Live, including MIDI and OSC. A remote GO LIVE on an unstarted pass is refused just the same — and over OSC the refusal is silent, so if a controller seems to do nothing on the first press of the night, this is the first thing to check. See Remote control.

Arm it during the pre-show check, not at the top of the show

The confirmation is per application run, so a rehearsal in Live at 17:00 arms and burns the pass at 17:00. If the pass is sized for the day that is fine and it is the right time to discover the dialog. What you do not want is meeting it for the first time at 20:55.

Starting a pass is recorded locally as well as on the server, signed against the machine, so relaunching the application — or losing the network — does not hand you a fresh window. Nor does winding the clock back.

If the window closes while you are still on air

Nothing throws you off air. HotPunch keeps the show running for up to four hours past the expiry of a pass, purely so that a Break can be resumed and an automatic breakaway can recover. Beyond that, going back into Live is refused with Runner license expired.

Saving and exporting survive the expiry: an expired Runner degrades to Editor rather than to Demo, so you can still get the project and the EDL out.

Working without the internet

HotPunch does not phone home during a show. It checks the licence server once, when the application starts, and then leaves the network alone. There is no heartbeat, and no check when you open a project.

If that startup check cannot reach the server, the licence keeps working for 10 days from the last successful check. You are told, once, at launch:

License Verification — Could not reach the license server. Your license will continue to work for 6 more days without internet.

When the ten days run out, the next launch says so and the application drops to Demo — which, mid-tour, means a machine that will not go live:

License Verification Required — Your license has not been verified for over 10 days, so HotPunch is now in Demo mode: saving, export and GO LIVE are disabled. Connect to the internet to restore the full version.

Practical consequences:

The countdown only advances at launch. An application left open for two weeks is not demoted mid-session; it is demoted the next time it starts. Equally, a machine that has been off for a fortnight discovers the problem at the worst moment. Launch it once on a network before you travel.
Show Passes are exempt. A pass is at most 96 hours long, so it is allowed to run its window out with no network at all.
A machine activated offline is exempt too. If HotPunch has never successfully reached the server on that machine, the ten-day rule never starts. An air-gapped install keeps working.
Moving the clock backwards forces a re-check. HotPunch keeps a forward-only high-water mark of the time it has seen and re-reads it every five minutes. Turning the clock back more than an hour invalidates the grace period until the next successful online check — which, on a machine with no network, means Demo. Do not fix a timecode problem by changing the system clock.

If the server answers and says the licence is no longer valid, that is not a grace case:

License Invalid — Your license is no longer valid: reason. The application will run in demo mode.

Reading the License page

Settings > License shows a tier pill, who the licence belongs to, a status line and — for anything except a Perpetual licence or an unstarted pass — a validity row counting down in days, or in hours once it is under a day.

Two things about that page are worth knowing before you use it to diagnose anything:

It does not tick. It is redrawn when something happens to the licence, not on a timer. A page left open does not update, and neither does the title bar. Close and reopen it.
A machine activated offline reads Expired in the status line, because the page's notion of "valid" includes "was confirmed by the server at some point". Nothing is actually wrong: saving, export and GO LIVE all work. Judge by the tier pill and by whether GO LIVE is enabled, not by that word.

Also on that page: the tier pill shows the plan written in the licence, not the plan you currently have. A Runner in an exhausted offline grace period still shows RUNNER while behaving as Demo. Again, the reliable signal is the GO LIVE button and its tooltip — which always states the real reason it is disabled. See Running the show.