Buying

AnyBucket costs $9.99, once. There's no subscription and no account. It's sold through Polar, the store behind every Clever Mechanisms app: you pay with your email address, and Polar takes you to your purchase, where you download the app and copy your license key.

Your purchase stays in the Polar customer portal. Sign in with the email you bought it with to download the app again, copy your key or see the Macs it's active on.

Activating

Open AnyBucket and paste your license key when it asks. That's the activation.

  • Activating creates a random installation ID for this copy of AnyBucket, with a label like Mac · 1a2b3c4d in the portal. It never uses your Mac's name or its hardware identifiers.
  • The key, the activation and the time of the last check are kept in a device-only keychain item on this Mac (dev.rolottr.AnyBucket.polar). It doesn't sync to your other Macs.
  • Updating or reopening AnyBucket reuses the same activation. It doesn't use up another Mac.

Manage the license under AnyBucket → Manage License… or Settings → License. About AnyBucket shows it too.

Two Macs per license

One license covers two Macs. Install AnyBucket on the second Mac and paste the same key. Polar counts the activations, so a third Mac needs one of the first two to be deactivated.

Moving to another Mac

Removing the app from a Mac doesn't free its place. Before you move, do one of these:

  1. On the old Mac: choose AnyBucket → Manage License… and deactivate.
  2. From anywhere: open the Polar customer portal, find your AnyBucket license and remove the Mac you no longer use.

Then activate on the new Mac with the same key. If you deactivate a Mac in the portal while AnyBucket is running there, it asks for a license again at its next check.

Working offline

AnyBucket checks your license with Polar at activation, at launch, when it comes to the front and every 15 minutes while it runs. Each check sends the license key, the activation ID and the random installation ID. Nothing about your servers or your files.

After a successful check, AnyBucket keeps working offline for up to seven days. Only an explicit refusal from Polar, such as a license that was deactivated or doesn't match, locks AnyBucket at once. Anything that isn't a verdict counts as offline: no network, a hotel's captive portal, a proxy's page, or Polar unreachable or rate-limiting requests. When you're back online, the next check renews the seven days.

Updates

Once a day, AnyBucket asks clevermechanisms.dev for its latest version number: a plain request, with nothing about you or your servers in it. When a newer version is out, it opens the download page. It never downloads or installs anything by itself.

  • Check now: choose AnyBucket → Check for Updates….
  • Turn the daily check off: Settings → General → Updates.
  • What's new: every release is in the changelog.

To update, open your purchase in the Polar customer portal, download the new ZIP, unzip it and replace AnyBucket in your Applications folder. Your license, bookmarks, workspaces and transfer queue stay as they were: the activation is reused, and everything else lives in ~/Library/Application Support/AnyBucket/ and your keychain.

Privacy

The license check and the update check are the only connections AnyBucket makes besides your own servers. The privacy policy lists exactly what each one sends.