Licensing

Without a license

Opening and viewing data always works. No license, no account, no trial required — you can open FCS files, read their keywords, choose axes and scales, and look at plots, including with the compensation recorded in the file.

Saving a workspace always works too. Saving is never blocked by your license — not without one, not during a trial, not after a license expires. Neither is opening a saved workspace.

This is deliberate, and it stays true after a license expires: nobody should be locked out of work they have already done because a purchase order is slow.

What a license adds

Capability	What it covers
Editing an analysis	Creating and editing gates, gate counts and the statistics table, compensation editing and auto-compensation, auto-gating and clustering, batch, dose-response and proliferation analysis, UMAP, and importing gates or labels
Exporting results	Statistics and event CSV, figures (SVG, PNG, PDF), the compensation matrix, gate templates and Gating-ML
AI-assisted gating	AI-1 and the AI copilot

The welcome screen sums it up as “Gating, compensation and statistics”, “Export to CSV, PDF and figures” and “AI-assisted gating — our own model, and the assistant”.

Every paid tier grants all three. The tiers — Trial, Evaluation, Academic, Commercial, Enterprise — differ in term and terms, not in features.

Seat counts are recorded on the license but not enforced by the software; the license panel says so beside the seat count.

Saved work stays viewable

A workspace saved while you had a license reopens without one as saved: its gate tree, the counts on those gates, and the gated and compensated plots. What needs a license is changing it — a new gate, a moved gate, a different parent, a different compensation matrix — and the statistics table and other analyses.

The gate toolbar shows “View only — editing gates needs a license.” (or “…needs an active license.” once one has expired) so the boundary is visible before you reach it.

Starting a trial

On first launch, the Welcome to Cytogence FCS dialog offers Start 30-day trial, Import license and Continue viewing only. The same Start 30-day trial button is on the licensing banner and in Preferences → License for as long as a trial is available.

One trial per installation. The option disappears once a trial has been used on that machine, and it is not offered on a machine where a signed license is or has been installed — renew or replace the license instead.

Installing a license file

You will receive a license file from us — a small signed .json file.

1. Click Import license — on the licensing banner, in the welcome dialog, or in Preferences → License (the gear icon in the toolbar, then the License tab).
2. Pick the file.
3. It is verified before it is stored, so a bad file never lands on disk. If the signature does not check out, you get an error rather than a silently broken install.

Preferences → License then shows the status, who the license is for, its type, the expiry date with the days left, the seat count, and the features available now. With a license installed, the button there reads Replace license.

About the file extension

The extension is cosmetic — the app reads the contents and verifies the signature, not the name. .json is what we send, because browsers and mail clients handle it without renaming, but .cytogence-license is also accepted, and the file picker has an All files option.

If you have an older build where the picker only shows .json files and yours has a different extension, renaming it to end in .json is safe and sufficient.

When a license expires

You keep full read access, and you can still save. Editing, export and AI stop, and the message names what was blocked — for example “Exporting results requires an active license. … — contact Cytogence to renew.” A machine that never had a license is told it “requires a license” instead, so the two situations are never confused.

The licensing banner warns you 14 days before expiry, with the days left. After expiry it reads License expired. and offers Import renewal.

Unsaved work is protected: if a license lapses mid-session, Don’t Save on close keeps the auto-save recovery copy rather than discarding it. See Workspaces.

Moving to another machine

Preferences → License → Remove license detaches this installation. Install the same file on the new machine.

Data collection

This version does not collect your gating data. Nothing about your gating leaves your machine.

Any future collection to improve AI-1 from real gating decisions is opt-in, never opt-out, and nothing will be collected retroactively. The license records the policy: Preferences → License → Usage-data sharing reads either Not permitted by this license or Permitted only with your consent · nothing is collected in this version.

If the license panel says your clock looks wrong

Licenses are time-limited, so the app notices when the system clock reads earlier than a date it has already seen. Preferences → License then says so, and expiry is measured against the later of the two dates. If your clock genuinely was wrong (a dead CMOS battery, a VM restored from a snapshot), fix the clock — if the message persists, tell us.