---
title: "How a Pro license works offline"
description: "Does Pro keep working without a connection, and what happens if the license cannot be refreshed?"
date: 2026-09-01
author: "ModelPiper"
tags: ["Licensing", "Offline", "Pro", "Activation"]
type: "faq"
canonical: "https://modelpiper.com/help/offline-license-activation"
---

# How a Pro license works offline

> Does Pro keep working without a connection, and what happens if the license cannot be refreshed?

Pro keeps working offline for about a week. Your tier is carried in a signed token the app already holds and verifies on the device with no network, so nothing is confirmed at the moment you use a feature. The app refreshes that token at launch and every six hours when it can, and a cached token stays valid for 7 days past its expiry without one.

## What happens with no connection

Everything you have unlocked stays unlocked, and there is no check at the point of use that a missing network can fail. In the background the app refreshes the token at launch and every six hours when it has a connection. Miss those refreshes and the cached token carries you for another 7 days.

Past that window with no successful refresh, the app falls back to Free and prompts you to reconnect. Reconnecting once restores your tier; nothing is lost and nothing has to be repurchased.

## Free features cannot lose

Free is the floor, not a license state. A missing, expired or unreadable token resolves to Free, so local inference, speech and the free tools keep working through any licensing problem, including the fallback itself. If something local stops working, licensing is not the cause.

## If a feature says it needs Pro and you have Pro

Sign in again from the Account view in ToolPiper. That gets a fresh token immediately instead of waiting for the next scheduled refresh, and it is the repair step for a reinstall or a token that aged out offline. A new Mac takes a seat of its own; Pro includes one, so on a second Mac the account page on the website is where you free that seat or add another.

If it persists after signing in again, write to support with the diagnostic from the Support tab. The diagnostic is redacted before it is written, and you can read it before you send it.

## Why it is built this way

Verifying a license over the network at the point of use fails closed when the network fails, and the people it locks out are the ones who paid. Verification happens against something the app already holds, and the grace window exists so that a week without a connection is a normal working condition rather than an outage.