Pro and the licence file

Pro is not on sale yet. Everything plottypus 1.0.0 shows is free, and live readings will stay free. This page explains what Pro is planned to be and how its licence file works, so you can judge it before it exists.

What is free, for good#

• Every live reading: system, CPU, GPU, ANE and DRAM power, clocks, battery, heat, fans, per-process energy and GPU.
• The full process table, tree, details card and signals.
• Both surfaces, every built-in theme, the settings page, all three key profiles.
• --json, --json-stream, --diagnose, doctor and --demo.

No trial, no nag screen, no feature that stops working after a week.

What Pro will add#

Pro is for memory and automation on top of the live view. These are planned for 1.1; none of them is in 1.0.0:

• History: scrub back through hours and days, with what was running at the time.
• Alerts: notifications or shell hooks on sustained conditions, even with no dashboard open.
• Reports: energy and battery summaries (plottypus report today|week).
• Record and replay a session.
• Exporters: Prometheus metrics (plottypus serve) and CSV (plottypus export --csv).
• A theme pack, a theme editor and btop theme import.

The status line for tmux, SketchyBar and Starship (plottypus line) also arrives in 1.1, and it is free.

In 1.0.0, a valid Pro licence does one thing: it keeps the dashboard’s history on disk under ~/.local/state/plottypus/history/ instead of only in memory for the session. The features that read that history arrive in 1.1.

Pricing, when it happens#

The plan is a one-time purchase that covers every 1.x update, for one person on up to three Macs. Pro gets built and sold only once the free release passes 500 installs or GitHub stars. Until then there is nothing to buy, and this site has no buy button.

The licence file#

Pro is unlocked by a small TOML file, checked offline with an Ed25519 signature. No account, no activation server, no network call, ever. The binary does not contain a network client.

# plottypus licence: keep this file; it unlocks Pro offline.
product = "plottypus"
major = 1
tier = "pro"
licensee = "Jane Appleseed"
email = "jane@example.com"
issued = "2026-09-23"
expires = "2027-09-23"     # optional; absent = all of 1.x
machine_limit = 3
signature = "<base64 of the 64-byte Ed25519 signature>"

Every field except signature is signed as one canonical text. plottypus checks, in order: the signature against the public key built into the binary, that the product is plottypus, that major matches the running version (a 1.x licence works on every 1.x release), and that it has not expired. machine_limit is part of the signed terms, not something the binary phones home to count.

Commands#

plottypus license add ~/Downloads/plottypus-license.toml   # verify, then install
plottypus license status                                   # tier, licensee, expiry
plottypus license remove

license add verifies the file before copying it into place, with the same temp-file-and-rename write the config uses, so a bad file never replaces a good one. It installs next to your config:

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/plottypus/license.toml
~/.config/plottypus/license.toml          # when XDG_CONFIG_HOME is not set

Without a licence, status says so and lists what Pro adds. This is the 1.0.0 output; its list still names the status line, which 1.1 makes free:

$ plottypus license status
plottypus Free: no licence at /Users/you/.config/plottypus/license.toml
Pro adds: history, alerts, reports, record, status line, exporters, theme pack, perf test
add a licence with: plottypus license add <file>

A missing or invalid licence simply means Free; nothing else changes. status says exactly why a file was refused, for example the signature does not match; the file was altered, this licence is for plottypus 2.x, not 1.x or the licence expired on 2027-09-23.

Terms#

The EULA covers the free and Pro tiers: the free tier on any number of your computers, for personal or commercial use; Pro for one named person on up to three computers, for the major version it was bought for.