How your licence works

There is no account and no sign-in. Nobody has a password here, including us. Your licence is a small signed file on your Mac, and a key is how you get it.

Getting it in

1. Subscribe on wingmannico.com.

2. A licence key arrives by email. It looks like NICO-7F3A2K-9WQXBN-4HJ5TC-P8RMDV.

3. Open the Status screen in Nico, press Enter licence key, paste it, and press Use this key.

Capitals, hyphens and spaces do not matter. Neither do the characters that are easy to misread: the key alphabet deliberately contains no I, no L, no O and no U, so a typed I is read as 1 and a typed O as 0. You can read a key off a screen and type it in without getting it wrong.

A paste that is obviously not a key is refused on your Mac, with no request made at all — so a fat-fingered key costs you nothing and tells you immediately.

It is checked here, not there

The licence file carries a signature and a date. Nico checks both on your own Mac, with no network. So Nico keeps working on a plane, in a hotel behind a captive portal, or with the network switched off entirely — which is the point of a desktop app.

About once a month, as the period you have paid for comes to an end, Nico asks our server for a fresh licence. That request carries your key and a machine fingerprint, and nothing else: no files, no voice, no transcripts, no list of what you have built or asked. A subscriber with three weeks left makes no requests at all.

If that request cannot be made — no network, a portal, our server having a bad day — nothing happens and nothing is taken away. The licence on your Mac is still valid and Nico tries again later. There is no daily phone-home, and no version of a network problem in which Nico locks you out.

Cancelling does not cut you off early

Your licence is good for a few days past the end of the period you paid for. So cancelling on the 10th when you have paid through the 30th means you keep working until the 30th, and nothing needs to be revoked. The Status screen says Ending rather than Active in that state, so it is clear we have noticed.

Your first licence is deliberately short

The first licence we issue runs out about a fortnight after your first payment rather than at the end of the month. That is the price of the 14-day no-questions refund: a refund on day 13 against a licence good for a full month would leave weeks of software that nobody paid for.

It costs you one extra check-in, once, and Nico does it by itself as long as the Mac reaches the network sometime in the second week. If it does not, the Status screen says Needs a check-in and never Ended — your subscription is fine and the app says so. After that first month, licences run to the end of each period as you would expect.

Where the licence file lives

In Nico's own application-support folder, alongside the key. It is bound to this Mac, so copying it to another Mac does not work — paste the key there instead, and see Nico on more than one Mac.