Activation

Fregata needs an active licence — paid or trial — to record from cameras and run detection. The activation step happens once per Mac, takes about ten seconds, and is the only network round-trip the app makes that touches our servers under normal operation.

Paid licence ($10 / year)

If you’ve purchased a licence, you’ll have an email from no-reply@fregata.3rdbitlabs.com containing a key in the form frgt_XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX.

1. Launch Fregata. The activation window appears.
2. Paste the email address you used at checkout.
3. Paste the licence key from the email.
4. Click Activate.

Fregata talks to the licensing service, binds the licence to this Mac (via a one-way hash of the hardware UUID), and opens the main app. The activation is durable — the resulting token is stored in the macOS Keychain, so you don’t have to re-enter the key when you restart.

What “valid until <date>” means

Your licence is valid for every version of Fregata released before the expiry date. Those versions keep running forever with the same key, even after the licence date passes. You only need to renew if you want to update to a release published after expiry.

In other words: nothing breaks the day your licence expires. Your recordings stay accessible, detection keeps running, your cameras keep working. The update menu just goes quiet until you renew.

30-day trial

If you don’t have a key, click Start a 30-day trial in the activation window. You’ll be asked for an email — the trial key is mailed to that address and pre-filled into the activation window automatically.

Trial keys have the same shape as paid keys (frgt_…) and unlock the same feature set. After 30 days, the menu-bar tray surfaces a one-click Convert to paid — $10 option that turns the trial into a paid licence — same key, no reinstall, the expiry just bumps forward a year.

Two days before the trial ends, we email a heads-up with a one-click convert link in case you’ve drifted away from the app and forgotten the date.

Moving Fregata to a different Mac

A licence is bound to one Mac at a time. To move it:

1. On the new Mac, sign in to the licence-management page with the email on the licence.
2. Find the licence card and click Release from this Mac.
3. Install Fregata on the new Mac and activate with the same email and key.

You can release a licence up to 3 times in any 30-day window. Beyond that, email support and we’ll bump it for you.

See Moving & uninstalling for the full walkthrough including data migration.

Offline grace period

Fregata heartbeats with the licensing service in the background (roughly every six hours, plus a small jitter). If the Mac is offline — travelling, ISP outage, you’ve yanked the network on purpose — the app keeps running for 7 days without a successful heartbeat before refusing to record. Reconnecting within that window resets the clock immediately.

This means most users never hit the limit. Even a long weekend without internet leaves headroom; the seven-day window is sized for genuine outages, not for reaching home from a trip.

What gets sent during activation

The activation request includes:

• The licence key and email you typed
• The Mac’s app version (so we can check it’s covered by your licence’s update window)
• A hashed machine identifier — sha256(IOPlatformUUID) — used only to bind the licence to this Mac. The original UUID never leaves the machine.

Heartbeats after activation are smaller: just the rotating token, the app version, and (unless you’ve opted out) a single block of technical telemetry. The full list is on Privacy & telemetry.