Licensing & Trial
See Pricing for current prices. Tier features:
| Tier | What you get |
|---|---|
| Free | 1 actively-monitored vault (a folder, not a whole drive root), all core detection features (encryption, scheduling, notifications), PAR2 protection + repair at Light (5%) redundancy |
| Pro (yearly) | Unlimited vaults, whole-drive vaults, email/ntfy alerts, drive health (SMART), report export, PAR2 at Standard/Archival redundancy on every vault, updates while subscribed |
| Lifetime (one-time) | Everything in Pro, plus all future updates forever |
Core detection (scanning, corruption/missing/move detection, database encryption, scheduling, OS notifications) is free on every tier — paying unlocks scale (multiple actively-monitored vaults, higher PAR2 redundancy) and extra convenience/enterprise features, not the basic safety net.
If you have more vaults than Free allows
FileGriffon never deletes your data because a trial ended or a subscription lapsed. If you’re on Free with more than one vault (created during a trial, or kept from a previous Pro period), only your oldest vault stays actively monitored — the rest are paused, not removed: still fully visible in the dashboard, still browsable, just not scanned until you upgrade again. See Vaults for the full behavior.
Trial
A free trial (14 days) is available via Settings → License → Start Trial. Trials are issued by FileGriffon’s license server rather than tracked purely on your machine, specifically so that resetting your system clock doesn’t extend it.
Note: only the 72-hour activation grace period below applies when FileGriffon can’t reach the license server. There is currently no separate grace period when a trial or subscription itself expires — Free-tier limits apply immediately (see “If you have more vaults than Free allows”).
Which tier am I on?
The top bar shows a Free, Trial or Pro badge next to the version number, on every page. Click it to jump straight to the License settings.
Buying Pro
Settings → License → Upgrade to Pro starts a purchase from inside FileGriffon. Pick Pro (billed yearly) or Lifetime (one-time payment), enter your email address, and Continue to checkout opens the payment page in your browser — FileGriffon itself never handles your payment details. The prices shown are a guide: the exact amount you’ll be charged, including any tax and in your billing currency, appears on the payment page before you pay.
Your email matters here: the license key is sent to it, and it is locked on the payment page so it can’t be changed there. Check it before continuing. If you mistype a well-known provider FileGriffon offers a correction, but it can only catch obvious slips.
Once payment completes, your license key is emailed to you, and it’s also shown on the page you land on afterward. Come back to Settings → License and activate it as below.
You can also buy from Pricing instead — the result is identical.
Activating a license
- Settings → License → enter your license key → Activate.
- This contacts FileGriffon’s license server once to verify and store your activation locally.
- After that, license checks happen offline — FileGriffon verifies your stored license itself, with no network call.
Your key looks like FGLICENSE-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX, but you don’t have
to type it exactly that way. Lowercase, extra spaces, groups separated by
spaces instead of dashes, and dropping the FGLICENSE- prefix entirely
all name the same license and are accepted.
”No seats available”
A license covers one machine at a time. If activation fails because the seat is already in use — a reinstall, a rebuilt PC, or a machine you no longer have — the error includes an Email support button that opens a pre-filled message asking us to free the seat up. See also Migrating to a new machine, which is the clean way to do this when you still have the old machine.
Staying up to date
About once a week, FileGriffon re-checks your license with the license server in the background. That is how a renewal reaches your machine: when your subscription renews, the new expiry date arrives on its own and you don’t have to do anything. It is also how a license that has been revoked (for example after a refund or chargeback) stops working.
Being offline never costs you your license. If the check can’t reach the server — no internet, a firewall, or the server being down — nothing changes and FileGriffon carries on exactly as before. Only an explicit “this license is no longer valid” answer from the server reverts you to the free tier. An air-gapped machine keeps working indefinitely.
Free-tier installs check in weekly too. If you have no license and no running trial, FileGriffon contacts the license server on the same weekly schedule to record that the install is in use. It sends only the same machine fingerprint used for activation and trials — no license key, and nothing about your files, vaults, or settings. It’s how we know how many people actually use FileGriffon; without it, a free install is invisible to us. Nothing about the app changes if it can’t reach the server. See the Privacy Policy for the full description.
If activation can’t reach the server
If the license server is unreachable when you try to activate, FileGriffon runs fully unlocked for 72 hours while it keeps retrying in the background. This grace period is a one-time allowance per install — it won’t repeat every time you’re briefly offline.
Deactivating
Settings → License → Deactivate License releases the license from this machine (e.g. before moving it to a new one).
A note on activation
Your activation is tied to this machine specifically, so it can’t simply be copied or transplanted to another computer — that machine will just show as unlicensed. Treat your license key itself like a credential too and don’t share it — someone else activating it on their own machine still uses up one of your seats.