Legal Agreements
End User Licence Agreement
The licence for the desktop application itself — what you may do with the installed copy, what you may not, and what happens to it when the subscription stops.
Contents11 sections
This is the licence for the software on your machine. The website and the subscription are covered by the Terms of Service. This one is between you and NextWorks LLC, and it applies from the moment you install Dispatch, including during a trial and including a copy that is still sitting on a laptop after a subscription has lapsed.
You accept it by installing or running the software.
The licence
While your subscription or trial is current, you get a non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to install and run Dispatch for your own work — your own commercial work included — on up to 3 machines you control.
That is the whole grant. Everything below is either a limit on it or an explanation of something the software does that you are entitled to know about in advance.
What you may not do
- Share your key. One licence, one person or one organisation. Seats exist so you can work across your own desktop, laptop and a VM — not so a team can buy one.
- Resell, sublicense, rent or host it for someone else to use.
- Remove, patch out or work around the licence check, or help someone else do it.
- Redistribute the application, modified or not, in whole or in part.
- Remove the copyright and licence notices from anything you are permitted to copy.
Reverse engineering, honestly
Dispatch is a compiled binary sitting on your own hard drive. You can take it apart. Pretending otherwise with a clause forbidding you to look at software that ships on your own machine would be theatre, and this product does not do that — Licensing already sets out in public exactly what raises the cost of patching the licence check out, and that a determined person with a disassembler gets through anyway.
So the line here is drawn where it can honestly be drawn:
- Reading it, debugging your own installation, and taking it apart to understand it are fine. Where local law gives you a right to decompile for interoperability, that right is not affected by anything here.
- Defeating the licence check, or distributing anything that helps others defeat it, is not fine, and is the one clause we would actually enforce.
Plugins, and what loading one means
Plugins are Luau, loaded from your user-data folder and run in a separate Lune process
rather than inside the application. A plugin’s whole world is the one dispatch object the
host hands it: there is no require, no io and no os.execute, and a capability its
manifest did not ask for is not a name it can reach.
Plugins you install are yours. We do not review them, we do not sign them, and this licence covers none of them. What each one is allowed to do is listed on its card in the Marketplace — hostnames written out in full — before you install it, and that list is the thing to read.
What the software does on your machine
Stated here so it is on the record and not only in the documentation:
- It starts and runs shells you point it at and runs the commands you or your agents send them. What those commands do is between you and your machine.
- It checks your licence at every launch, sending your key, a machine fingerprint, the machine’s name, its operating system, the app version and a signature from this machine’s own key — and nothing else. What is in your terminals never leaves your computer. Privacy lists the fields.
- It updates itself in the background and never restarts to do it. The swap happens the next time you quit. You can see a staged update in the sidebar before it applies.
- It falls back to the last signed answer for 72 hours when the licence server cannot be reached, and stops opening after that.
Third-party components
Dispatch is built with Rust · Tauri · portable-pty and xterm.js, and ships other open-source components. Each keeps its own licence, and those licences govern those components rather than this agreement. The notices ship with the application.
Ownership
We keep the copyright and every other right in Dispatch that is not granted above. You keep everything of yours: your code, your terminal output, your documents, your projects, your plugins. Nothing you do in Dispatch gives us a claim on any of it.
Warranty
To the extent the law allows, the software is provided as it is, without warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or uninterrupted operation.
Two specific things this product declines to warrant, because it knows better:
- That the licence check will always reach the server. It is why the 72-hour grace window exists.
- That an installer will not be flagged by SmartScreen. Builds are not yet signed with an Authenticode certificate, and the Download page says so before you click rather than after.
If you are a consumer, your statutory rights — including the right to software that is of satisfactory quality and as described — are unaffected.
Liability
The cap in the Terms of Service applies to this agreement too: what you paid in the twelve months before the claim, with the usual carve-outs for things the law does not permit to be limited.
When this ends
This licence ends when your subscription or trial ends, or immediately if you breach it.
What that means in practice: after the 72-hour grace window, the application stops opening. It does not delete anything, phone home about it, or interfere with your machine. Uninstall it whenever you like — your workspaces, documents and settings are files in your user-data folder and stay there until you remove them.
Subscribe again and the same key starts working again.