Trial and license

Pellet is paid software with a free trial. No account, no card to start.

The trial

14 days of use. Not 14 days on the calendar — 14 distinct days on which you actually opened Pellet. The clock starts the first time you open a vault.

So if you try it on a Friday and then get pulled onto something else for a fortnight, you come back with thirteen days still to spend. Winding the system clock back doesn’t earn extra days, and it doesn’t cost you any either.

On phones and tablets

Pellet on iPhone, iPad and Android is free. No trial clock, no key to enter, nothing to buy. The trial and the license on this page are a desktop matter only.

That’s because of App Store rules rather than generosity: Apple doesn’t allow an app to unlock features with a key bought outside the store, so the mobile builds ship unlocked instead.

After the trial

Without a license, Pellet stops writing to your vault. It does not stop reading it.

That distinction is the important one. An expired trial can still:

• open every note, task, canvas and drawing
• search the whole vault
• export

You are never locked out of your own files by software you stopped paying for. If Pellet went read-only in a way that hid your notes, it would have made your data hostage, which is the opposite of the point.

What read-only actually turns off

More than the save itself, because a button that’s still clickable but always fails is worse than one that isn’t:

• Creating anything is disabled, not left to fail. Every New button and every entry in the new-document menu — note, task, canvas, whiteboard, paper, recording — greys out, with a tooltip saying Pellet is read-only until a license key is entered. You can’t get half way through a recording and then find there’s nowhere to put it.
• The read-only banner can’t be dismissed. The trial countdown bar can, and hides until the next launch. Once the app is actually read-only the notice stays, because an app that silently refuses to save is the worse failure.
• Device sync stops. In Settings, the buttons that would start it — turn sync on, create a group, join one, re-pair, resume — are disabled rather than dead-ending. The ways out stay available: turning sync off, leaving a group, and cancelling a join all still work.
• Calendar sync pauses in both directions. Connected calendars stop being read, and nothing is written back to them. Changes you make on this side are queued, not dropped — they go out once there’s a key.
• The local API and MCP server stop listening. An agent or script pointed at it gets a clean connection-refused rather than a server whose every write fails. Settings shows License required, and your port, token and per-operation switches are kept exactly as you left them. See AI & MCP.
• A sync relay hosted on this computer stops serving your other devices, and stays stopped when you relaunch.

Reading, searching, opening and exporting are untouched by all of it. That is the line.

Activating

Paste your license key into Settings. It activates for that device.

Everything in the list above comes back the moment the key goes in — the create buttons, sync, the calendars, the API, the relay. There’s nothing to restart.

Licenses move: deactivate one machine and the slot frees up for another. Replacing a laptop doesn’t cost you anything.

Offline

Pellet re-checks a license with the server roughly every 14 days, and keeps working for 30 days with no successful check at all.

The gap is deliberate. An offline-first app that stops working on a long flight, in a hotel with bad wifi, or because a license server had a bad afternoon, is broken. Being offline is never the reason Pellet stops.

If something goes wrong

If a license check fails in a way you don’t expect, email help@getpellet.app. The failure mode should never be “your notes are gone” — worst case is a vault you can read and export while it gets sorted out.