ConchshellPricing
The application is free and stays free. Carrying your saved connections between your own machines is a single payment of $19 — no subscription, no account, no renewal.
What costs nothing
SSH, SFTP, FTPS and RDP in one window. Split panes and a real PTY, a dual-panel file transfer, host monitoring with CPU, network and live logs. Every desktop platform; the apps for Android, iPhone and iPad are free too.
The encrypted vault that holds your passwords and keys is part of the free build, not a paid tier. So is every future release.
There is no trial to run out, no feature that greys itself out after a fortnight, and no screen asking you to buy. If you never pay anything, nothing changes.
What $19 buys
Conchshell Sync — your saved connections, folders and credentials carried between the machines you use yourself. Set it up once and a host added on the desktop is there on the laptop.
All of your own machines, not a seat count. Updates included, with no second payment and nothing to renew.
What you get is a key, not an account. It is checked on your own machine, offline, against a signature compiled into the build, so it keeps working with no network. Once a day a copy with a key also downloads our list of revoked keys, signed with the same key as the licences; a key on that list stops unlocking sync.
One page: an email address and the payment. The key arrives at the address you give — there is no account to create.
Why this is a purchase and not a subscription
An account is the thing this application does not have and does not want — the whole design puts your credentials on your disk, encrypted, and keeps them off ours.
So the licence is a signed file, verified on your machine with no network at all. It can be withdrawn only in the cases the User Agreement sets out, and only through that signed list or a list built into a later version, neither of which a server of ours can forge. It cannot stop working because we stopped existing: if our server disappears, the app keeps the last list it accepted.
For scale: a year of the usual subscription SSH client runs to about $120, and that is every year. This is $19, once, and the rest of the application was never behind it — the full comparison is on the Termius alternative page.
$19 now, $29 later
$19 is an introductory price while Conchshell finds its first users. It will go to $29.
A key bought at the lower price is not repriced afterwards, and it does not become a smaller licence when the price moves. This is said here rather than discovered later.
How buying works
Questions people actually ask
How many machines does one licence cover?
All the ones you use yourself. There is no seat count to manage and no activation limit to hit at an inconvenient moment.
Does the licence expire?
No. What you bought keeps working, on the machines you have, for as long as you use it. There is no date after which it stops.
Can you see my connections?
No. Sync mirrors the encrypted vault into a folder you already sync — iCloud Drive, Dropbox, a git checkout — and it is encrypted before it is written. A phone linked by a QR code read off the desktop also exchanges it directly over your own network while the app is open on both. Either way it never passes through anything of ours.
What if I do not buy it?
Everything except syncing works exactly as it does now, indefinitely. The one knock-on effect is on phones: they cannot import key files, so a private key reaches a phone only inside a vault linked from a computer with Sync; without it, a phone signs in with passwords. The paid line is drawn around one feature, and it is drawn honestly.
Refunds?
Set out in the User Agreement. If the thing does not do what this page says it does, write and say so.