USB-bound licensing for professionals

The license belongs to the stick

Per-seat activation is a reasonable model for software somebody installs on their own desk. It is a poor model for a machine you will touch once, for forty minutes, and hand back. The license you spend on that PC is gone, and the customer inherits an activation they did not ask for and will never use.

TuneBit picks its binding mode automatically from where TuneBit.exe is running. There is no flag, no separate portable edition to buy, and no setting to get wrong.

TuneBit fingerprints the physical stick, not the folder on it. Copying the folder off the stick onto a hard drive produces a different fingerprint and the license does not follow, which is the point of the mechanism rather than a side effect of it.

What leaves the machine, and what does not

Whichever mode is in play, the identifying details are scrambled into a single fingerprint that cannot be turned back into the original. That fingerprint is the only thing ever transmitted or carried in a license code. Your motherboard serial and your stick's serial number never leave the machine.

The drive letter is deliberately left out of the fingerprint. That detail is small and it matters more to you than to anyone else: the same stick mounts as E: on the bench PC, G: on the laptop with the card reader, and D: on the machine with no optical drive. If the letter were part of the fingerprint, your license would appear to break on every third machine you plugged into, and it would look like a licensing fault rather than the drive-mapping accident it actually was.

Offline-first, because the network is often the fault

A license code is digitally signed, and TuneBit checks that signature on the machine in front of it. The signature alone proves that the code was issued by us and that it names this stick, so activation completes with no internet connection at all.

This is not a convenience feature bolted on for edge cases. Consider what a technician is usually doing when TuneBit is open: the network stack is broken, the adapter is not coming up, DNS resolves nothing, or the machine is a fresh install with no drivers yet. A licensing scheme that phones home before it will let you work would fail on precisely the machines it was bought to fix. The server call exists — it answers the one question the code itself cannot, namely whether a license has since been revoked or a plan has lapsed — but it is a revocation check layered on top, not the gate you must pass to start working.

Every three days, not every launch

TuneBit remembers the server's last answer and calls home again only once that answer is three days old. Those same three days are the offline grace period: a license that cannot be re-confirmed keeps working for three days, and only then are you asked to re-activate, buy a code, or quit.

Those two numbers are the same on purpose. If they differed, there would be a gap in which the app had stopped asking but had not yet stopped trusting — or, reversed, one in which it nagged somebody still inside their window. Keeping them the same is what makes "checks every three days" and "works offline for three days" one behavior instead of two that have to be kept in step by hand.

The clock resets on every successful check, so a stick that touches any online machine within a three-day window never prompts at all. Days one and two start with no network call whatsoever.

Long-running sessions are covered too. A workshop PC left open for a fortnight would otherwise pass one check on the Monday and never be asked again, so TuneBit keeps watching the clock while it is open — including on resume from sleep, which a simple timer would sleep straight through.

A copy that leaves nothing behind

Running from a removable drive relocates everything TuneBit writes into the folder holding TuneBit.exe. Nothing lands on the client's PC.

This reads as a professionalism point and it is one. It is also a data-hygiene point. The registry export TuneBit takes before it writes, the driver backup it takes before a force-reinstall, the HTML report naming the customer's machine — none of that is your customer's to keep, and none of it should be sitting in a profile directory on a PC you have handed back. It leaves with you, on the stick.

The portable build

The portable exe carries the .NET 10 runtime inside it, so it runs on a machine with no runtime and nothing installed — a locked-down desktop, a fresh Windows install, a PC you are there to repair. That costs size: roughly 70 MB against roughly 26 MB for the build the installer wraps.

The very first launch on a given PC takes a couple of seconds longer, because the bundled runtime has to be unpacked before the app starts. Later launches on that machine reuse it.

It is code-signed like any other build. Signing matters here more than it does for most utilities: TuneBit needs administrator rights, so an unsigned build would show the yellow "Unknown publisher" prompt on every single launch. Explaining that prompt to a customer whose machine you are already holding is not a conversation worth having twice.

What Technician costs

TuneBit Technician is $89.95 a year per USB stick. One license covers one stick, and that stick runs on unlimited client PCs. It includes exportable HTML system reports you can hand to a customer, and priority email support. You can order up to 100 sticks in a single purchase.

Every tool is unlocked on every plan. There is no higher tier holding features back and no upsell inside the app — Technician differs from Personal in what the license is attached to, not in what the software will do.

It is a one-time annual charge, not a subscription. Nothing renews on its own and no card is kept on file for a future charge. Buying again before expiry stacks another year onto the remaining term and reissues every active code with the new expiry, so a stick in a technician's pocket keeps working without anyone re-registering it mid-term.

Running a shop this way

The practical arrangement is one stick per technician. Each stick is its own license, so the count you buy is the count of people who carry one, not the count of machines that pass through the bench.

To register a stick, run TuneBit from it and open Settings. The hardware ID is shown there with a copy button. Paste it into your account dashboard and a license code comes back. Re-registering a stick you already hold re-issues its code without consuming a second seat, so a botched activation is not an expensive mistake.

When a stick is lost or dies, be clear-eyed about what has happened: the license is tied to that specific stick, and a code issued for it will never work on different hardware. There is no way to move the code itself. What you can do is release that seat from the dashboard — which you reach from any browser, not from the missing stick — and register the replacement stick's hardware ID against the freed seat. Releasing marks the old code revoked, which takes effect on that copy's next check-in, so a lost stick can run for up to three more days before it stops. If your situation does not fit that flow, talk to support rather than guessing — priority email support is part of what the Technician plan is for.

Further reading

• Why you need TuneBit — the case for consolidating thirty-odd Windows utilities into one window, and what the app deliberately is not.
• What TuneBit does — a tour of the six groups in the sidebar and what each one is for.
• How TuneBit works — the architecture underneath, and the safety rules that apply to every section equally.
• TuneBit for everyday users — the same tools from the other side of the bench, including the one-click tune-up.
• The full cleaning and repair feature set — all 34 tools, section by section, with what each one actually touches.
• TuneBit vs. CCleaner, IObit and iolo — how it compares to the rest of the category, feature by feature and dollar by dollar.