Licensing & activation

toryo requires a license. There is no free tier and no unlicensed mode: an install that has never been activated will not run.

What is licensed is the runtime, not the download. The binaries are freely downloadable, and the check happens when board launches and when the background services boot.

How you activate depends on who you are. Both paths start the same way: launch board, which opens the activation dialog automatically when it finds no license.

If you work only from a terminal, the same two paths are CLI commands:

toryo license trial --email you@example.com            # start a 14-day trial
toryo license activate --email you@example.com <key>   # activate a seat

Either surface activates the whole install. There is one license per machine, not one per app.

Trying toryo on your own#

Choose Start free trial and enter your email address. That is the whole step. There is no key to type, no card, and nothing to configure.

You get 14 days of the full product. Nothing is held back for the trial version, because there isn't one: it is the same toryo a paying team runs.

A few things worth knowing:

• A trial carries a single seat, so you can evaluate toryo across your own machines but cannot invite anyone onto it. Everyone else on your team starts their own trial instead, which needs nothing from us and nothing from you.
• The countdown is always visible, in the dialog and on board's nav, read from your own install rather than fetched, so it stays accurate offline.
• Reinstalling does not reset the clock. Asking for a trial again with the same address returns the one you already have, ending on the same date.

When the 14 days are up, toryo stops and the dialog asks for a license key. The app will not run again until it has one.

Buying does not disturb anything you built. The license is a gate on running toryo, not a container for your work: activating performs no migration and moves no data. Everything your agents learned during the trial, the memories, the library, the code index, is exactly where you left it, and buying a license is a change to the license rather than a move of your knowledge.

Joining a team#

Your account's administrator issues you a seat, and mails you two things: your email address and a license key.

Choose Enter license key in the dialog, and give it both. The key alone is not enough, because the key is bound to the address it was issued to. Entering someone else's key with your own address is refused, and told apart from a mistyped key, so you know which of the two is wrong.

That is the entire sign-in. There is no password and no account to create.

What a seat covers#

A seat is a person, not a device. One seat covers every machine you work on. Activate on your laptop and your desktop with the same email and key; toryo records each machine it has seen against your seat rather than replacing the last one. There is nothing to deactivate before setting up a new machine.

Seats are provisioned by your administrator and are never self-serve, so ordinary use cannot push a team past what it is paying for.

A trial is per person and self-serve, which is the exception: everyone evaluating toryo starts their own with their own address, so a team can look at it together without anyone provisioning anything first.

Knowledge belongs to the license it was created under, which is what keeps one team's brain separate from another's. If you trialled toryo on your own and then join a team, the work from your personal trial stays personal rather than following you onto your employer's knowledge plane. Nothing is deleted, and it is there again if you go back to that license.

Staying activated#

Activation checks in once with the license service, which returns a cryptographically signed proof your install caches locally. Everything after that is evaluated from the cache, so day-to-day work never depends on the service being reachable.

• On a paid license, a failed check-in never blocks you. toryo still phones home at boot to pick up a revoked seat or a plan change, but losing your connection is not treated as losing your license.
• On a trial, the countdown comes from the cached proof, so it works with no network at all and ends on exactly the date you were promised.

Because the proof is signed, the cache cannot be edited to extend itself or forged to invent a license.

When toryo will not start#

Board and the background services refuse to run in four cases:

The background services are held down rather than killed: foreman stays up, supervises nothing, and re-checks on every tick, so re-activating fixes it in place with nothing to restart. Board raises the same dialog it shows at first launch.

toryo license status reports the same state from a terminal, and exits non-zero when the install is blocked, so a script can branch on it. toryo doctor includes it in the wider health check.

Bring your own agent#

Licensing covers toryo itself. You bring your own agent credentials. toryo drives your own coding-agent sessions under your own account, takes no margin on model usage, and never sits in the path, so a toryo license does not include model usage and does not replace your subscription with a provider.

One consequence worth knowing: our price does not move with how hard you run it. A seat costs the same whether you queue four jobs a week or four hundred.