Skipping the free trial was the exploit

Yesterday's fix lasted a day. Read-only fires when a trial expires, and the trial's clock starts the moment you paste in a token that arrived by email. So an install that never pasted anything had no clock, ever. The way to use Beatstack forever for free was to skip the free trial.

That's the curious shape of the bug: every stricter version of "enforce this harder" only punishes the honest person who started the clock. The free rider was never late. He wasn't in the system at all.

So the rule flipped. A grant comes from the token; the absence of a grant is not a grant. No token pasted, no library, no export, nothing but the screen asking for one. One promise held through the reversal though: the projects folder is still yours, still plain files, and a lapsed writer can read every word back the second a token lands. The app locks. The work never does.

Reversing a shipped decision in a day isn't a good look. But the mistake was designing a lock for someone who was already cooperating, which is the easiest person in the world to design for, and the one who was never the problem.