What it costs, and why it stays that way
Most plugin prices are fiction. A device is listed at 129, sold at 79 two weeks later and at 39 in November, and everyone who paid full price learns not to do that again. We would rather write the rule down and keep it.
The rule
A new device launches with 30 % off for two weeks. After that the list price stands, and it stays standing. No Black Friday, no summer sale, no weekend offer, no discount code in a newsletter. If you buy on a Tuesday in March you pay what everybody pays.
That costs us money in November and we know it. The industry discounts between 50 and 70 % on Black Friday. The trade is worth it: a list price that means something, and no reason for you to wait.
Updates
Updates are free. Not "free within version 1", not "free for a year" — free. If a device gets better, the people who already bought it get the better device. If a new operating system breaks it, fixing that is our job, not a reason to sell you the same thing again. Should a device ever be rebuilt from scratch into a genuinely different product, that is a new product with a new name, and you can ignore it.
Your licence, and what happens if we disappear
A serial here is not a key stored on a server. It is a calculation over your email address: the device does the same arithmetic on your machine and either the numbers match or they do not. That has three consequences worth stating plainly.
That last one is the point. Plugin companies close, get bought, switch their licensing. When their servers go off, the plugins go with them. Nothing here talks to a server to run, so there is nothing to switch off. Lose the serial and My licenses sends it again; lose the email address and write to us, we move it.
Why there is no demo
There used to be one, and we took it out. At nine or nineteen dollars a trial clock costs you more than the plugin does: download, install, play for two minutes, hit the wall, go back to the website, buy, install again. That is twenty minutes of your evening to save a decision you could make in one.
So instead of a crippled version, we put the things you would actually use to decide where you can see them for free: the full interface at full resolution and an audio example. If it still turns out not to be for you, Paddle refunds you within fourteen days and does not ask why.
What is free, and what free means
HALO is a complete reverb and costs an email address — nothing held back, no expiry, no nag screen, no feature reserved for a version that costs money. It is the honest way to find out whether the things this label builds are for you. CUE has no free version — the demo on its page is the whole device running in your browser, and the download is nineteen dollars, once.
There is a tip jar on the HALO page. It is entirely voluntary, it changes nothing about what you get, and it pays for the next room.
Refunds and tax
Sales run through Paddle as merchant of record, which means your invoice, your VAT and your refund are handled by a company that does that for a living. Fourteen days, no reason needed — that is what stands in place of a demo. The refund page says exactly what happens, and an email to [email protected] reaches a person.
This page is a commitment, not a campaign. If it ever changes, it changes before the prices do — not afterwards.