Account

Trial and licence

Free for 30 days, then $29 once.

Dispatch runs with every feature for 30 days. There is no account to create and no card to enter.

How the 30 days are counted

The trial counts days you opened Dispatch, not days on the calendar. A month where you write on four days spends four days of the trial. Counting days used rather than elapsed time also means a Mac whose clock is wrong cannot end the trial early.

What stops, and what does not

When the trial ends, four things stop: editing, publishing, printing, and formatted copy.

Everything else keeps working — opening a piece, reading it, exporting it, revealing it in Finder, moving your library, and every control in Settings. Your writing is plain markdown in a folder you chose, and it stays reachable whether the app is licensed or not.

Save a Copy of Everything… in the action bar keeps working too, so a dated copy of the whole library is always one keystroke away.

A banner appears for the last five days of the trial and again once it has ended. It is a banner and not a wall: nothing has to be dismissed before you can read.

Buying

Buy — $29 opens the checkout in your browser. The key arrives by email.

Entering a key

Press ⌘K, choose Licence…, and paste the whole line from your receipt email. Line breaks are fine. Then press Activate.

Keys look like DISPATCH-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX. Keys issued as WRITER- before the app was renamed are accepted permanently.

One key covers five Macs. If activation says the key is already in use on five, free one from the Polar customer portal, or write to support.

Activating is the one moment Dispatch waits on the network. Launching never does — the licence is read from what is already stored on the Mac. A background re-check runs at most once a day and acts only on a clear answer, so being offline leaves your licence exactly as it was.

For what a licence check sends, see Privacy.

Privacy

What Dispatch does and does not send anywhere.

There is no account and no sign-in. Dispatch collects no analytics and reports no usage.

Your writing

Plain markdown files in a folder you chose. Dispatch reads them, writes them, and sends them nowhere. See Where your files live.

Licence checks

Dispatch posts to the licence server twice when you paste a key — once to check it, once to register this Mac — and at most once a day afterwards to re-check it. Apart from the update check below, that is the only address it ever connects to.

Three things travel: the licence key, identifiers for the product it belongs to, and — on activation only — your Mac’s name, which labels that activation so you can tell your Macs apart when you need to free one. Nothing about your writing goes with it, and the app stores no password or token for anything.

Update checks

Dispatch fetches a signed feed to find out whether a newer version exists. System profiling is switched off, so the check sends nothing about your Mac — not its model, not its macOS version, not its language. See Updates.

Proofreading

Spelling is checked against the macOS dictionary, on your Mac. The mechanical checks are plain pattern matching. Nothing is uploaded and no language model is involved. See Proofreading.

Publishing

Dispatch never signs in to a destination. Publishing puts the piece on the clipboard and opens the destination — a composer in your browser, or an app on this Mac. Whichever it is holds the session, and you paste. See Destinations.

An image is carried into what you paste only when the file sits inside your writing folder. A reference pointing outside it is never read, and the message after publishing names any image that could not be included.

Getting help

Where to write about a problem.

Write to support@broodingjay.com. It is the same address the app gives you when a licence key is already in use on five Macs.

What to include

• The version, from Dispatch → About.
• What you did, and what happened instead.
• The markdown file, when one particular piece is involved. A file the app is asked to open is the main thing it reads from outside, so an attached .md is usually the shortest route to a fix.

Licence and purchase

A key that isn’t recognised, an activation that won’t complete, or a key already in use on five Macs — read Trial and licence first, then write.

Anything that loses writing

A save that truncates a piece, a piece that opens blank, a note that disappears after a rename. Report these. For an app whose whole job is holding your words, that is the most serious kind of report there is, and it is treated that way.

Take a copy before writing in: press ⌘K and choose Save a Copy of Everything…. It copies the whole library into a dated folder outside it and changes nothing in the original.

Security

Same address, with SECURITY in the subject line. Please don’t file it publicly first. You will get a reply within seven days.

Especially worth reporting: anything that reads or writes a file outside the folder you pointed the app at, anything that crashes the app from opening a file alone, and anything wrong with the licence check that could lock out someone who paid.