Bandura is free to download and run, and nothing in it is locked behind a licence. This page covers who we ask to buy one, what buying gets you, and how to enter a key. The full terms are the licence agreement — this is the practical version.
Do you need one?
Free indefinitely, no licence, no account — personal projects, learning and teaching, academic research, unpaid open-source contribution, and use by a charity or non-profit. There is no trial and nothing expires.
A licence is asked for commercial use — work you or your employer are paid for, including freelance and client work. You get 30 days from first install to evaluate commercially before we ask, and then it’s one seat per person who uses Bandura, not per machine. Install it on your laptop, your desktop and a CI box on one seat.
Either way, nothing is disabled. Day 31 is exactly as capable as day 1, licensed or not.
What $59 per seat buys
- Twelve months of updates. Every release built within twelve months of your purchase date, at no further cost.
- The version you have keeps working forever. Nothing expires, degrades, goes read-only, or loses a feature when the twelve months are up.
- Betas and new releases before they’re public, and your bug reports answered first.
Renewing after the twelve months is optional and costs less than the first purchase. You can also just stay on the build you have, indefinitely.
Activate a key
Your key arrives by email after purchase. It’s a single line beginning BND1.
- Open Settings — ⌘,, or the gear in the activity bar.
- Find the Licence section (second from the top).
- Paste the key into the field and click Activate.
The panel then shows who the licence is registered to, the order id, and its dates. To move a licence off a machine, click Remove licence.
If the once-a-day reminder is on screen, I have a key in that dialog does the same thing — no need to go to Settings.
How verification works
The key is signed with an Ed25519 signature. Bandura checks that signature on your own machine, against a public key compiled into the app.
That means: no account, no sign-in, no server, and no internet connection required — ever, not even the first time. Nothing about your licence leaves your computer, because there is nowhere for it to go. It keeps working offline, on an air-gapped machine, and if we disappear tomorrow: there is no service that can be switched off to stop the software you paid for.
What’s in the key
The key is a readable record of the purchase. Settings → Licence shows the same fields:
| Field | What it is |
|---|---|
| Name & email | Who the licence is registered to. |
| Order id | Quote this in any email to us. |
| Seats | How many seats were bought. |
| Issued | The purchase date. |
| Updates until | The last day of your twelve-month update window. |
| Version line | The major version covered — 1 means the 1.x releases. |
One thing worth saying plainly: seats are a record of what was purchased, not something the app enforces. Bandura doesn’t count installs, doesn’t track machines, and doesn’t check the number against anything. It’s a term of the agreement and a line for your procurement file — the honesty system, on purpose.
After 30 days without a licence
A dismissible reminder appears, at most once a day. Not on every launch — open Bandura six times in an afternoon and you’ll see it once.
That is the whole of it. No feature is switched off, no flow becomes read-only, no run is blocked, and no countdown appears. Dismiss it with Not now, Escape, or the ✕.
After your update window ends
If you install a release built after your updates-until date, the same dismissible once-a-day reminder comes back on that build, mentioning a renewal. Nothing else changes: every feature works exactly as it did.
The build you already have is unaffected — its build date is inside your window, so it stays silent forever. Staying put is a perfectly good answer.
Troubleshooting
”This key isn’t valid. Check for a missing character…”
The signature didn’t verify, and in practice this is nearly always a copy-paste problem rather than a bad key. The key is one line with no spaces and no line breaks. Copying it out of a wrapped email body is the usual culprit — a soft wrap turns into a real newline, or a trailing character gets left behind.
Select the whole line from the original email, paste it, and check nothing was clipped at either end. If it still fails, mail us and we’ll re-issue it.
”That doesn’t look like a Bandura licence key…”
The text isn’t key-shaped at all — it doesn’t start with BND1. or is missing one of its
parts. You’ve probably pasted the order confirmation, a receipt number, or a truncated line.
”This licence covers a different major version”
You should never see this. The app checks your update window, not your version line — if a release was built inside your twelve months it is covered, major versions included. If it does appear, write to [email protected]; it’s a bug, not a bill.
Moving to a new machine
Paste the same key. That’s the entire procedure — there is no deactivation step, no machine limit, and no server keeping count. Your seat is one person, not one computer, so your laptop, desktop and CI workstation all take the same key.
I’ve lost my key
Email [email protected] with the order id from your receipt, or from the address you bought with, and we’ll send it again. We keep the order records precisely so this is a two-minute problem.
Related
- The licence agreement — the governing text, in plain English.
- Refunds — 30 days, no reason required.
- Settings & appearance — the rest of the Settings view.