Licensing and Trial

[Live]

This chapter explains how Clawless licensing works: the trial, the plans, how to activate a license, what happens if your trial ends, and how to manage your subscription.

The trial

Clawless starts with a 7-day free trial. No credit card required. You enter your email on our website, you get a license key by email, you paste it into the app on first launch, and you are running.

During the trial, the app is fully featured. Nothing is locked or watered down. The trial is meant to give you a real sense of the product.

After the trial

If you do not subscribe before the trial ends, the app flips to a read-only mode. You can still:

Open the app.
Read your existing conversations and memories.
Browse Settings and panels.

You cannot send new messages or run agents until you upgrade.

To upgrade, click the Upgrade button in the trial-expired banner. It opens our web portal in your default browser, where you pick a plan and pay.

Plans

There is one plan, Clawless, with three billing options.

Monthly. $4.95 per month.
Yearly. $50 per year (about 16% off the monthly rate).
Lifetime. A single one-time payment for permanent access. Early-backer pricing of $199 is the founding-member price, available for the first 3 months from public launch. Standard lifetime pricing of $299 applies after that window closes.

There is no tier split (no "Pro" or "Basic"). Every paid customer has the full app.

How payments work

Payments happen on our website, not inside the desktop app. When you click Upgrade, your default browser opens to our customer portal. The portal handles credit cards, taxes, and receipts.

We use Lemon Squeezy as our payment provider. They are the merchant of record for tax and compliance purposes.

The desktop app never asks for your card number. If anything in the app ever does, that is a bug; please report it.

You enter your license key on the activation screen that appears right after onboarding finishes. Paste the key, click Activate, and the app contacts our license server, binds the key to this computer, and saves it.

If you skip activation, the app runs in trial mode until the trial expires.

License binding

Each license activation is bound to one computer. If you install Clawless on a second computer, you can either:

Add a seat by activating the same key on the second computer, if your plan allows multiple seats. The portal shows the seat count.
Move the license by deactivating it on the first computer first (Settings, License, Deactivate this machine), then activating on the second.

You cannot have the same single-seat license actively running on two computers at the same time.

Daily license check

Once a day, the app pings our license server to confirm your license is still active. This check is small (no message data is sent, only the license key and a check-in timestamp).

If you are offline, the check fails silently and the app keeps working. There is a grace period before the app falls back to read-only mode, so a brief outage will not lock you out.

If our license server is down for an extended period, you will continue to use the app normally during the grace period. We monitor the license server uptime closely; outages are short.

Managing your subscription

Open Settings, License section, and you can:

See your current plan, status, and expiration date (or "lifetime").
Open the customer portal in your browser to update payment, change plans, or cancel.
Deactivate this machine (frees up the seat for another machine).

Cancelling on the portal does not cut you off immediately. Your license stays active until the end of your current billing period. After that, the app flips to read-only mode (same as a trial expiry).

Refunds

Yes, you can get a refund if you change your mind. We honor a 14-day refund window for first-time subscribers. Request a refund through the customer portal or email [email protected].

Lifetime purchases have a 14-day refund window as well. After 14 days the lifetime sale is final.

Common questions

Do I need a license to download Clawless? No. Anyone can download. You need an email-based trial license to use it past the welcome screen, and an active subscription past the 7-day trial.

Can I share my license with my family? A single-seat license is for one user. We have multi-seat plans for households or small teams; check the portal for current pricing. The honest version: for a small household, just buy one seat each. The product is cheap on purpose.

What happens to my data if my subscription expires? Nothing. Your conversations, memories, agents, and settings stay on your computer. You go into read-only mode (cannot send new messages), but everything you had is intact. Resubscribe at any time and pick up where you left off.

Can I get a discount? We do not run frequent sales because the price is already very low. We may offer occasional promo trials (3 or 6 months) for specific announcements. If you are a student or in a country where the price is genuinely a hardship, email support; we listen.

Why use a license at all? Why not just open source it? OpenClaw, the engine underneath Clawless, is open source. Clawless, the desktop app, is commercial. The license funds continuous development, support, and the polish that makes the product easy to use. We think both can coexist: open foundation, paid product.

What is the customer portal URL? clawless.ai/portal (the link in the app's Upgrade button takes you straight there).

How do I delete my account? From the customer portal, request account deletion. We remove your license records and your portal account. Your local data on your computer is yours; deleting your account does not touch it.