Trial License

Trial versions of PixInsight are full-featured, fully functional, time-limited trial applications. In order to run one of these applications on your computer, you need:

• A valid PixInsight trial software license. Currently we offer a 45-day trial license at no cost. Our trial licenses allow you to try out full-featured versions of our software with free online updates and email support during the trial period.
• An active Internet connection each time you launch the core PixInsight application.

A trial license gives you the right to execute and use PixInsight for 45 days from the date of license approval. You can use a trial PixInsight license on any currently supported platform: Linux, macOS, and Windows. For security reasons, a trial license can only be used on a single machine. You are entitled to free email support and online updates during the trial period.

Please contact us if you need additional trial licenses to run PixInsight on different computers or platforms. Similarly, if you need an extended trial period beyond 45 days, we'll be glad to hear you. Our licensing policy is flexible, and we analyze different user requirements on a case-by-case basis.

After your trial period, you must purchase a commercial license to continue using PixInsight. Commercial licenses only require an active Internet connection to perform an initial software activation procedure. Once activated, a commercial license does not require an active Internet connection and allows you to install and run PixInsight on all supported platforms and on any computer you own.

Each time you launch the trial PixInsight executable, it establishes a secure HTTP client session that connects to our server to validate your license. If firewall software protects your system, it might detect PixInsight's connection attempt as a potentially dangerous outbound connection. You must permit this connection to the Internet, or PixInsight won't run. You should be able to specify Internet access permissions through configuration settings in your firewall or anti-virus software.

You can rest assured that the PixInsight core application will never send any information or data from your computer over the Internet other than the minimal data strictly necessary to validate your license with our server. During the entire license validation process, data are transmitted protected with an extremely strong encryption algorithm through a secure connection (AES-256 and HTTPS), so that nobody listening to the connection could be able to retrieve any information about you or your user license.

The advantage of our trial licensing system is that you can work with a fully functional application that allows you to open, process, and save images without limitations. You don't need to care about maximum file sizes or image dimensions, watermarks on saved images, or disabled features; what you try out is the exact product you can purchase later.

Requesting a trial PixInsight license involves the following steps:

1. Submit the form below. Bear in mind the following:
   
   • We manually verify all trial license requests to protect our system from continued abuse and hacking attempts.
   • Please don't send fake data or hidden IP addresses. HTTP proxies and VPN connections are not allowed. You must enter your actual name, address, and email address, and your IP must be traceable and identifiable. Reason: We grant you access to a full-featured, fully functional copy of the PixInsight platform for 45 days. As a PixInsight user, you are entirely responsible for the use that you make of our software; please don't try to elude your responsibility.
   • We don't allow temporary or disposable email services such as "trashmail", "thisisnotmyrealemail", "emailias", "10minutemail" and the like. Requests using these email services will be blocked or ignored without further consideration. Reason: we don't generate spam, so please don't treat us as spammers.
   • If you specify a URL where we can look at your work, or write a few lines to explain why and how you are interested in PixInsight, this will help us approve your license more quickly.
2. Our system will send you a confirmation email. If you don't get a message from us within five minutes, be sure to check your spam/junk mail and add noreply_at_pixinsight_dot_com to your "safe senders list" or a similar resource if our message didn't make it to your inbox. Please do not reply to our confirmation emails, as they are sent from an account that is never monitored.
3. We'll verify the data in your request manually. Your request will be ignored if you hide your IP address or specify fake or false data. When we detect repeated abuse or hacking attempts, we reserve the right to send detailed abuse reports to the corresponding email providers and ISPs.
   
   As noted above, providing a URL where we can see your work or some comments on your interest in astrophotography and PixInsight will help us approve your license. Naturally, we can make mistakes. Please email us asking why we haven't approved your trial license request if you think we should.
4. If your trial license is approved, our system will process it and you'll receive a new email message with detailed download and installation instructions, along with license activation codes.

Microsoft's email services are generating a lot of problems by rejecting notifications sent by our licensing system without understandable reasons, in most cases because of incorrect user account configurations. That has forced us to invest a significant part of our scarce user support resources in solving problems such as users who don't receive their license data, blocked support messages, license management services that cease working, etc.

For this reason, since January 2018 we no longer allow Microsoft email addresses for trial license requests. If you are a Microsoft email user (Hotmail, Outlook, MSN, Passport, Live), please use a different email account for your license. As two well-known examples, free Gmail and Yahoo email accounts work perfectly with our licensing system. Sorry for the inconvenience.