Licensing and the evaluation period

Nightship runs on a time-limited evaluation out of the box; production use needs a signed license file. Licensing is fully offline — no phone-home, air-gap friendly.

The evaluation period

A fresh self-hosted server runs on a time-limited trial measured from the build’s date (currently 45 days). Everything works during the trial. When it lapses, an unlicensed server hard-stops — it returns 503 until a license is installed — so plan to install your license before the window closes.

Check the state

nightshipd license show --data-dir /var/lib/nightship

This reports whether the server is on trial, licensed, or expired.

Install a license

nightshipd license install <license-file> --data-dir /var/lib/nightship

The license is an Ed25519-signed file; the public key is baked into the binary, so verification is entirely local. There is no phone-home and no network call — a fully disconnected, air-gapped server is supported.

The local Drydock demo reports “Unlicensed,” which is expected — it’s a local evaluation environment, not a production deployment. To obtain a license, contact info@nightship.io.

Cancel or change a Nightship Cloud subscription

In the app, open Admin → Licensing for your *.nightship.cloud server (as an admin) and click Manage subscription…. It opens your billing portal in the browser: invoices, payment method, seats and cancellation.

After cancelling, the server keeps running to the end of the paid period. Then it is paused and its data kept for 30 days — reply to the mail you get for an export. After that it is deleted and the name becomes free again. A cancelled subscription cannot be resumed; to come back, simply sign up again on the Cloud page. Locked out of the server? Use Lost access? first.

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