Preferences
Licence
What is free, what a licence covers, how to activate one, and what happens if a key is refused.
PasteDaemon is free to use as a clipboard manager, for as long as you like. A licence adds the automation — the part that does something to what you copied, rather than only keeping it.
What is free
Clipboard history, search and OCR are free and stay free. There is no time limit on them, no account, and nothing that stops working:
- Every copy kept, and pasted back from the overlay — rich, or as plain text with
⌘⇧V. - Gathering copies with
⌘⌥A: copy several things, press it again, and paste them back one at a time. - Search across all of it, including the words inside screenshots — images are read as they go in, so a screenshot is findable by what it says.
- Pinning, deleting, per-app exclusions, retention, and everything else about how the history behaves.
That is a complete clipboard manager, and it is what you are left with if you never buy anything. Nothing has to be uninstalled and no copy is lost.
What a licence covers
The parts that act on what you copied:
| Pipelines | The search bar as a shell — $1 | upper, arithmetic, > $name |
| Triggers | Rules that run the moment you copy |
| Actions | Named transformations, run by hand or from a rule |
| Variables | Named values with their own history |
| Abbreviations | Keywords that expand as you type |
| Secrets | The encrypted vault |
| Local API | The HTTP server and the MCP server |
Beta, trial and free
Until 1 January 2027 everything is switched on and nothing is counting down. After that, a fresh 30 days of everything, and then the free tier above.
Using PasteDaemon through the beta does not spend your trial: the thirty days start on 1 January, however long you have had it. If you install it for the first time after that date, your thirty days start then.
Activating a licence
Preferences → Licence, paste the key, click Activate.
Your key is one long line beginning with PDMN., sent to the address you bought with. It is checked on your Mac — no request is made, nothing is sent anywhere, and it works with no network at all. It covers every Mac you own and every future update, and it never expires.
Removing a licence from a Mac — for one you are handing on — does not stop the key working. It is a signature over your address, not a seat.
If a key is refused
Three things are commonly pasted into that field that are not your licence:
A key beginning with a plain number and dashes, like 38b1460a-5104-4067-a91d-77b17e2f9f11, is your Lemon Squeezy receipt key — a record of payment, sent with the receipt. It is not a PasteDaemon licence and PasteDaemon cannot accept it. Yours came in a separate email.
A key beginning TXTO. is a Textracto licence. The two apps are sold through the same store, so if you own both you have two keys in your inbox that differ by four characters. PasteDaemon's starts with PDMN.
A key that looks right but is refused is nearly always a partial copy. It is one long line with no break in the middle; select all of it.
If none of those is it, reply to the email your key came in.