Licensing

How you can use ProRDP depends on whether you’re using it for yourself or for a business.

Home and personal use

ProRDP is free for home and personal use. You don’t need a license key or an account. Download it, install it on your Mac, and connect from any Remote Desktop client.

Every feature is included, with the exception of any that require cloud resources or a backing service, such as Entra ID sign-in.

Commercial use

If you use ProRDP for a business, such as on employees’ Macs, build machines or client work, you need a commercial license for each Mac. A commercial license adds the cloud features, starting with Entra ID sign-in, and gives you one place to see and manage every Mac you’ve licensed.

Nothing that runs on the Mac alone is ever locked. Remote sessions, display modes, the clipboard, audio and every other setting work the same with or without a license. A Mac with no license, or with a lapsed or expired one, is simply a Personal Mac. It keeps serving sessions exactly as before, and only the cloud features are unavailable. A Mac that temporarily can’t reach the licensing service doesn’t lapse straight away: it stays Commercial on its current lease (see How a Mac stays licensed).

How commercial licensing works

Commercial Macs belong to a workspace. Think of a workspace as your company’s (or your team’s) pool of ProRDP licenses:

• You create a workspace by buying it, signed in to the portal with a work or school Microsoft account, or a personal one. The person who buys it is its first owner.
• You buy licenses, one per Mac. A workspace can have as many Macs active as it has licenses.
• You add Macs to the workspace one at a time with an activation code, or across a whole fleet with your MDM.
• Owners can give other people in their organization a role: Owner, Activator or Reader.

Where to go next

• Licensing a Mac: buy a workspace and activate your first Mac.
• MDM enrollment: license a whole fleet without touching each Mac.
• Roles and members: who can do what in a workspace.

Pricing

Commercial is priced per Mac, by the month or by the year, in graduated tiers. The more Macs you license, the less each additional Mac costs.

Prices are before tax, which is added at checkout where it applies.

Graduated means each Mac pays the price of its own band, counted across the whole workspace. For example, 30 Macs billed monthly cost 5 × $4.99 + 20 × $3.99 + 5 × $2.99. Adding a Mac never lowers your bill, and your earlier Macs never get more expensive.

Verified non-profits get 20% off. Email hello@prordp.app and we’ll check your organization and apply the discount to your subscription.

The free trial

Every new workspace starts with a one-month (30-day) free trial. You enter a card at checkout, but nothing is charged until the trial ends. Cancel before then and you’re never billed.

During the trial, changes to your licenses and plan apply at once, and nothing is charged:

• Raise or lower your licenses, never below the number of Macs in use.
• Switch between monthly and yearly. The workspace page shows what you’ll pay on each plan when the trial ends, and how much a year saves.

Managing your licenses and billing

Open your workspace in the portal to see your Macs, your licenses, your plan and when it renews. Only owners see billing.

Changing your licenses

Under Licenses, enter the number you want and choose Review change. The portal shows the price per period before and after the change, band by band, and what you’ll be charged now. Nothing changes until you confirm.

• Adding licenses is charged for the rest of the current period. On a monthly plan, the prorated amount goes on your next invoice. On a yearly plan, it’s invoiced and charged at once.
• Licenses stay paid until renewal. Deactivating a Mac frees its license for another Mac, but you won’t get a credit mid-period. Lowering your licenses takes effect shortly before renewal, so you’re charged only for what you keep, and never for fewer than the Macs in use.

Automatic license settings

Two settings under Licenses decide what happens as your fleet changes:

If you turn the first setting off and the second on, a Mac that joins after a renewal needs a license added first.

Monthly or yearly

Yearly is cheaper per Mac. You can change your plan in the portal’s Manage billing page:

• Monthly to yearly is charged at once, prorated for the rest of the year.
• Yearly to monthly happens when the year you’ve already paid for ends. The year isn’t credited. Your workspace page shows “Your plan changes to monthly on …” until then.

Payment method, invoices and cancelling

Manage billing opens your Stripe billing page, where you can update your card, billing address and tax ID, download invoices, change between monthly and yearly, and cancel. Stripe’s page doesn’t change your number of licenses. Do that in the portal.

If you cancel, your Macs stay licensed until the end of the period you’ve paid for, and nothing more is charged.

When a payment fails or a subscription ends

If a payment fails, your Macs aren’t switched off. You get 14 days of grace while Stripe retries the payment, and ProRDP tells you about it in Settings and in the menu bar. Everything keeps working. Update your card under Manage billing to clear it.

If the payment still hasn’t gone through after the grace period, or once a cancelled subscription reaches the end of the period you’ve paid for, your Macs become Personal the next time they check in. Cancelling doesn’t switch anything off before then. Even when Macs do become Personal:

• A session that’s already connected is never ended.
• A cloud feature it’s already using keeps working until that client disconnects.
• Your Macs keep working as Personal Macs. Nothing local is lost.

Pay the open invoice, or buy again, and your Macs return to Commercial the next time they check in.

If a workspace ends up with more active Macs than it allows (because an owner lowered the Mac limit, for example), its owners are asked to choose which Macs to deactivate. After 7 days, the least recently seen extra Macs become Personal on their own.

How a Mac stays licensed

When you activate a Mac, the licensing service gives it a lease: a small signed file that says the Mac is Commercial. The lease is tied to that one Mac, so a copy on another Mac is useless.

• ProRDP refreshes the lease about once a day in the background.
• A lease lasts 14 days. If a Mac can’t reach the licensing service at all, such as when it’s offline, it stays Commercial for up to 14 days from its last successful refresh.
• A lease never outlasts what backs it. A Mac whose subscription lapses becomes Personal on time even if it’s offline.

Your Mac contacts the licensing service only to activate, refresh and release its license. When it activates, it sends a name for the Mac, its macOS and ProRDP versions, its serial number (so you can tell your Macs apart in the portal), and a one-way hash of its hardware ID. The hardware ID itself never leaves the Mac. A Mac you haven’t activated has no reason to contact the service.

Questions

For anything not covered here, such as whether your use counts as commercial, invoicing, or licensing Macs that never go online, email hello@prordp.app.