Licence and activation
One key per computer, checked on that computer. No server, no account and no dependence on the internet — a shop floor does not always have a network, and a job cannot wait for one.
Activating, step by step
- In the top bar, click Licence needed.
- The Licence window shows this computer’s code — four groups of four, like
570E-EF1A-9AC2-B6D8. Click Copy. - Send us that code.
- Back comes a small file, named after your company, ending in
.impomatrix. - In the same window, click Open licence file… and choose it. The window closes, the overprint leaves the sheet and Export comes back.
You can also paste the licence text into the box and click Activate. This computer’s code never changes, and a licence only works on the computer it was issued for.
What a licence survives, and what ends it
The code comes from the Mac’s logic board, not from the disk. Everything else follows from that:
The licence keeps working
- Reinstalling or upgrading macOS
- Wiping the disk, or replacing the SSD
- Installing a new ImpoMatrix over the old one
A new key is needed
- A different Mac
- A logic board replaced in a repair
Either way it is the same thing: tell us and we issue one. It is not a second purchase.
Renewing, when the licence is annual
- Thirty days before, a chip appears in the top bar counting the days down. Renewal is never a surprise discovered at six in the evening with a job on the press.
- On the day, exporting keeps working for seven more days. A key travelling by email must not stop a print run.
- After that, the program returns to its unlicensed state — it opens, imposes and previews with the overprint, and stops writing files. Nothing is deleted: not the presets, not the settings, not a single file.
Renewing costs you one paste: we know which computer is yours and send the new key. You never have to hunt for the code again.
What the program sends out
Almost nothing, and it is worth being exact — this is the question any print shop’s IT will ask.
- With a perpetual licence: nothing. Zero requests. There is no term to check, so the program never reaches the network at all.
- With an annual licence, the program asks the time — literally. It makes a request to two well-known hosts and reads the date off the response, to know whether the computer’s clock has been moved. It sends no licence, no computer code, no company name and nothing about your work. The request is indistinguishable from opening those sites’ home pages.
- With no network, nothing happens. The request has three seconds and is made after the window is already up. A shop with no internet, behind a firewall or on a captive portal works exactly the same — failing to reach the network is never treated as tampering.
- There is never any telemetry. No usage, no statistics, no files, in any version.
One thing said plainly. Signed keys tied to a computer stop the program being copied from one shop to another, which is what they are for. They do not stop someone determined to take it apart — no scheme of this kind does, and saying so is more honest than promising otherwise.