Why the trial ends with a lock, and why the site says so

Most trials in this category end softly. Features stop working one by one, a banner gets louder, and you find out what you actually bought a week later. SoftGlaze doesn’t do that, and the reason this post exists is that the first draft of the pricing page described the soft version, because that is what the plan documents said, and nobody had checked.

What the code does

Three stages, and they are in the source rather than in a marketing decision:

What the code does: table

Days	What happens
1 to 7	Everything works. Every feature, no card.
7 plus 3	Everything still works, and the app reminds you to subscribe.
Day 11 onwards	The app locks to a renewal screen until you buy a plan or enter a purchase code.

The canonical sentence, which now appears in the same words on the pricing page, the docs and the FAQ:

After 7 days you get 3 more days with reminders. Then the app locks to a renewal screen until you buy a plan. Your profiles and data stay on your computer, and unlock as soon as you do.

The lock is the whole app, not just the launch button. The sign-in gate replaces the interface with a renewal screen, and the main process refuses to launch profiles as a second line of defence. It applies to every member under that owner, not only the owner.

Why the site had it wrong

The planning documents said profiles would stop launching. That is what the older behaviour did, and it is what a reasonable person would assume from reading the licence policy file on its own. The actual gate is harder: it takes over the window.

That discrepancy was found while checking site copy against the code, which is the entire point of doing it that way. Three documents had to be corrected, and the corrections file that records it is checked at build time, so the sentence on the pricing page cannot drift back.

Why not soften it

Two reasons, neither of them noble.

The first is refunds. At $5 a month, the cost of a refund is trivial and the cost of a chargeback is not, roughly $15 to $25 in fees plus a ratio hit that can cost the payment account outright. Somebody who discovers a hard lock on day 11, having read that the app “keeps working”, is exactly the person who disputes the charge instead of asking. So there is a 14-day refund, no questions, and a page that tells you about the lock before you install anything.

The second is that the lock is honest about what a licence is. You are not renting storage on somebody’s server; your profiles and cookies are already on your disk. The only thing a lapsed licence takes away is the software’s willingness to run, and it hands it straight back when you renew. Nothing is deleted, ever, by us. We cannot delete it, because we never had it.

The part that isn’t flattering

The lock is local, and a determined person can get around it by editing the local database or the system clock. The source says so in a comment, which is why you will not find the word “tamper-proof” anywhere on this site. Moving licence signing and verification onto a server is the work that has to land before buying opens at all.

That is also why the trial is currently the whole product: there is no checkout yet, so nothing can lapse into a lock unless you started the trial and let it run out. When checkout opens, this page’s timeline is what you will be agreeing to.