When the free Xshell licence stops working for you

The free build is registered inside the application with your name and a valid email address, and you click a validation link within seven days. After that it wants the network permanently. NetSarang's own support article is direct: unlike enterprise licences, which may be used in offline environments, the free licences must maintain an internet connection in order to be used. Lose it and you get a registration-expired notice where the terminal should be.

For a tool whose job is reaching machines on isolated networks, that is a strange shape. The free grant is also locked to the major version: when Xshell 8 shipped, free licensing for version 7 ended and free users had to move up, while paid version 7 holders were left alone.

Conchshell has nothing to register. No name, no email, no validation link, no revalidation dialog. The one paid feature, syncing saved connections between your own machines for $19 once, is a key checked on your own machine with no network, and the rest of the application never asks whether you bought it.

NetSarang keeps a page for people whose free installation has stopped: your usage has been detected as non-compliant to the Free License EULA, and this software is no longer usable. The accompanying FAQ says the determination uses publicly available information such as IP ownership, together with your registration data.

Read that with a home user on a company VPN in mind, or a contractor on a business ISP range. The remedies offered are buy a licence, uninstall, or email support with an incident number. The EULA behind it is stricter than the marketing page too: one person, one desktop plus one laptop, no business use directly or through outsourced or subcontracted services, no technical support, and a policy that may be altered or revoked at any time without prior written notice.

Xshell 8 was $119 a seat on 20 August 2026, perpetual for that version, with a year of maintenance. The dual-pane transfer client is not included: Xftp is $59 alone, or $139 buys the Xshell Plus bundle. Extra maintenance is $24 for a year or $47 for two, bought at checkout. What NetSarang does not publish is the price of renewing once maintenance has lapsed; that page has a Renew button and a sales address, no figure.

The Conchshell basket is the application, free, on macOS, Windows and Linux, with the terminal, both file panes, FTPS, RDP and host monitoring inside it. The only line item is $19, once, for carrying your saved connections between your own machines, at the introductory price that becomes $29 later.

This is the move that cannot be undone by a settings change. NetSarang's requirements stop at Windows and no macOS build has been announced, so leaving the platform means leaving the application: CrossOver or Wine is the only way to take Xshell with you, and a small genre of "Xshell for Mac" pages exists purely to say so.

Conchshell is built natively for macOS on Apple silicon and Intel, for Windows, and for Linux as .deb, .rpm and .AppImage. The Apple silicon build of 2.15.1 is a 9.1 MB download, checked on 20 August 2026, and takes 18 MB on disk, measured on version 2.10.1 on 3 August 2026. One detour on Windows: the installer pulls Microsoft Edge WebView2 down from the network when the machine does not already have it. And the phone in this line-up is an Android APK from the site - not in Google Play, and there is no iOS build.

Xshell keeps every session as an .xsh file in your Documents folder, and unless a Master Password is set, the passwords inside are encrypted with a fixed key. That is NetSarang's own wording, along with the admission that it carries a risk. Public decryptors for the scheme exist, and Metasploit has a module that collects those credentials.

So the order that makes sense is: rotate anything that matters, then delete the session folder rather than leaving it on a machine you are done with. Conchshell's vault is XChaCha20-Poly1305 with an Argon2id-derived key, and its interface has no command that reads a stored credential back out. You can create one and destroy one, and that is the whole surface.

• No registration, no email validation, and no dialog demanding the internet before it will let you into a terminal.
• It runs natively on the Mac or the Linux box you moved to, as a real window rather than a Wine wrapper.
• FTPS beside the terminal, which no NetSarang product offers at any price, checked against the system root store.
• RDP and the two-panel file manager are in the free application, not a second purchase on top.
• Nothing can be switched off from the outside: no licence server decides whether today is a working day.

• Serial console work over a COM port with ZMODEM and X/YMODEM, and telnet and rlogin sessions. Conchshell has none of it.
• Triggers and the scripting object model in VBScript, JScript or Python. If a script watches your terminal and answers it, that script stays in Xshell.
• Kerberos and SSPI single sign-on, PKCS#11 smart cards, FIDO2 keys, OpenSSH CA certificates. Conchshell does passwords and private keys, and has no ssh-agent support.
• RDP to a host with NLA switched off, and anything published through Terminal Server or Citrix. Conchshell speaks CredSSP with NLA only and is no replacement for mstsc.
• A vendor with a support queue, resellers, and offline activation for estates that never reach the internet.

1. Xshell sessions are already portable. File > Export gives you an .xts file, which is a ZIP: rename it, unzip it, and you have the .xsh files as readable text with host, port and username.
2. Install Conchshell and build its own JSON bundle of connections, folders, profiles and settings. There is no Xshell importer, so the values from the .xsh files go in once, by hand or by script.
3. Expect to retype every credential. Conchshell keeps credentials out of its own import and export files by design, and there is no path that carries an Xshell password into it.
4. Keys stay where they are, as files. Give each connection the same path; an encrypted key asks for its passphrase at connect time, because Conchshell has no agent to hold it.
5. Every host asks for fingerprint confirmation on first connect, drawn by the operating system. Compare it once with ssh-keygen -lf on the server.
6. Then clean up the Windows machine: either set a Master Password on the old sessions or delete the folder under Documents\NetSarang Computer before you pass the machine on.

Download Conchshell

Is Xshell free for commercial use?

No. The Free EULA is for home and school, one person on one desktop plus one laptop, and it prohibits business use directly or through outsourced or subcontracted services. Free licences also get no technical support. For work, NetSarang's store listed $119 a seat on 20 August 2026, with volume tiers down to $97.

Why does Xshell keep asking me to revalidate my licence?

Because the free licence has to stay online. NetSarang's support article says enterprise licences may be used in offline environments while free ones must maintain an internet connection, so a dropped link, a captive portal or an isolated VLAN produces the revalidation dialog. Their documentation does not state how long the tolerance is before it appears.

Is there an Xshell for Mac?

There is not, and NetSarang has not announced one. The whole product line — Xshell, Xftp, Xmanager, Xlpd — is Windows desktop software, and the requirements pages stop at Windows. Running it under CrossOver or Wine is the only route, which is why CodeWeavers maintains a compatibility entry for it.

Is Conchshell really free, or does it expire?

It does not expire. The application is free on macOS, Windows and Linux and stays that way: no trial clock, no tier that greys itself out, no registration. One feature is paid, and only one — syncing saved connections between your own machines, $19 once at the introductory price and $29 after, with updates included and nothing to renew.

Do I have to create an account?

No, and there is no account system to create one in. Nothing signs in and nothing needs to be reachable for the application to open. The sync licence, if you buy it, is a key verified locally, so a laptop with no connectivity behaves exactly like one on a good network.

Will my saved Xshell passwords come across?

No. There is no Xshell importer, and Conchshell deliberately excludes credentials from its own import and export files, so nothing carries them in. You retype them once, into a vault that has no read-back command, and after that the route binding — host, port, user, proxy chain, jump host — decides when each one is offered.

Does Conchshell replace Xftp as well?

For file work, mostly. The two-panel manager is in the same free window as the terminal, with a transfer queue showing progress, speed and ETA, directory comparison and synchronisation, and remote files opened in your local editor and written back on save. It covers SFTP and FTPS. Plain unencrypted FTP is not among the protocols Conchshell lists, so a host that only speaks that is a reason to keep Xftp.

You lose the serial port, telnet, the triggers, the scripting model and the enterprise authentication stack, and you lose a vendor with a support queue. If any of those are load-bearing in your work, keep Xshell; a paid licence is perpetual, so it can sit there for the days you need it.

What you get back is an application that opens without asking who you are, on the operating system you actually use, with FTPS and RDP already in it. Download it, spend an evening moving the hosts across, and decide with both installed.

Download Conchshell

• What Conchshell is
• Download for macOS, Windows and Linux
• How the vault and host keys work
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