The free trial you could skip forever

For a day, a screenwriting app could be used free forever by skipping its free trial. Read-only fired on expiry, and only a pasted token started the clock.

An install that never pasted a token had no clock at all, so nothing ever expired. Yesterday's fix lasted a day.

Here is the shape of the problem. Every stricter version of "enforce this harder" lands on the one person who started the clock and meant to pay: demand a token before anything works and the honest buyer who lost the email is locked out too. The person skipping the trial was never late. He never started a clock.

So the rule flipped. A grant comes from the token. The absence of a grant is not a grant.

One promise held through the reversal: the projects folder is still yours, still plain files, and a lapsed writer reads every word back the second a token lands. The app locks. The work never does.

Reversing a shipped decision in a day is not a good look. But the mistake was designing a lock for someone who was already cooperating, and that person was never the problem.