Licensing
Our product licenses are sold on a subscription basis, available online from the “buy” section of each main product page. (Also see section Resellers below.)
You activate a license by providing it when prompted at first use of any plugin, along with your name, optional affiliation and a valid email. (Or, you can choose to start a trial, and provide a license later without needing to re-download and re-install.)
A license’s subscription period begins when it’s first activated by the first (or only) user, and not before. So you can purchase subscriptions online or from resellers, and start them when convenient, without losing any of the subscription period. For example, when you get close to the end of one subscription, you can purchase another subscription at your convenience, which you only activate when the previous one has ended.
A subscription license will work under any InDesign major version (back to InDesign 2021).
You can install a new (or previous) major version of InDesign (and the corresponding plugin) any time and continue using the same license (without even being asked) until its expiration. In other words, once a license is activated, you won’t have to even think about it again until it expires.
You’ll get plenty of warnings before a license expires, assuming you use the plugin occasionally.
There are no more “perpetual” old-style new vs. upgrade licenses for each major InDesign version, etc., as we had in the past.
Note that you do need to download a distinct plugin for each annual InDesign major release—that’s a limitation that Adobe imposes on developers.
You can run multiple versions of InDesign on a single machine, using a single license for a given Em plugin.
Renewals
Currently, there’s no way to “recharge” or renew an existing subscription, nor do we have auto-renewals. (Perhaps someday.)
What we have is a very straightforward subscription scheme—namely, purchase a license for the period you need and when that is done, “renew” by purchasing another subscription license for the next period.
You can purchase a renewal license ahead of time without worry, since the subscription period doesn’t start until you first activate it (after the previous license expires).
We hope this is easy to understand and simple to follow. Note that we do have 24-month subscriptions for many of our products, to minimize the time you have to deal with licensing.
User limits
Our licenses are sold for one or more InDesign (Creative Cloud login) users, with each user able to activate on up to two machines (like InDesign), as long as the two machines will never be used simultaneously, like a laptop and a desktop, or a home and an office machine.
Each license can only be activated by (up to) the number of users specified by the license itself, regardless of the number of machines on which each user has activated the license.
If you login to a different Creative Cloud account on a given machine, you will have to re-activate any license you had as that new user, which will count against the licensed-user limit.
If you really need to switch your Creative Cloud login, first deactivate your current license using the plugin’s About… > License… > Deactivate button, on all machines on which you’ve activated it, and then activate under the new login.
Managing multiple users
You can manage your own multi-user license entirely on your own, including moving licenses around.
Each InDesign user can activate the same multi-user license, up to the user limit of the license.
Using each plugin’s About… > License… dialog, you can click the License Info button to open a web page showing all current users of that license, and all devices on which the current user has installed the plugin. You can also click on any current user link on that page to see all the Em plugin licenses that user has activated.
To re-assign a license, you can deactivate a given user by deactivating their license on all installed devices, using the About… > License… > Deactivate button. Another user can then activate that license.
If the devices in question are no longer available (moved, discarded or wiped) such that you can’t deactivate any users on that device, we can help.
Distribution
We sell electronic-distribution products only—downloadable from each product page’s Install or update section—that are activated with a purchased license code.
These downloadable products also function as updates and as trial versions.
You can purchase and activate a license at any point during or after the trial without re-installing. Just open the plugin’s About > License dialog, and enter the new license and verify your name, optional affiliation and email, then OK your way out.
Resellers
You can also purchase licenses from our resellers around the globe, for more local sales and support.
You should still download all software from our site, regardless of where you purchase the license, though, to be sure you have the most up-to-date software.