Activate your license

Cozy is a one-time $35 purchase, with no subscription. One license covers every Mac and Windows PC you own, and Cozy for iPhone and iPad comes with it, with no limit on how many devices you put it on.

Where to buy

If you don’t have a key yet, you can buy one from the pricing section on the homepage. Checkout is handled securely through Stripe, and your key is emailed to you right after.

Students and educators get 40% off — verify your school email and the code comes straight back to it. Prices adjust to your country, so checkout shows you what Cozy costs where you live before you pay.

Entering your key

Open Cozy. The welcome screen asks for your license key the first time you launch it.
Paste the key from your purchase email.
That’s it — you’re ready to start writing.

The welcome screen also has a link to buy a key if you need one, and a link to recover a key you’ve misplaced.

If your key doesn’t take

Cozy tells you which of these it is, rather than leaving you to guess:

It was refunded, or is otherwise no longer active. A key stops working once a refund goes through.
It has expired. Uncommon for a bought key, but Cozy will say so plainly.
We couldn’t find it. Usually a typo or a half-copied key — paste it straight from your purchase email.

If the message says something’s off on our end, that’s exactly what it means: your key is fine, and it’s worth trying again in a little while.

Lost your key?

Head to Recover your key, or use the recover a key link on the welcome screen. Enter the email you bought with, and your key comes straight back.

That email also carries a sign-in link. It opens a small portal where you can see every key on your Cozy license.

Writing offline

Once your key is in, Cozy doesn’t need the internet to keep working. It quietly checks in now and then, but a check that doesn’t get an answer changes nothing at all. Write offline for a week, a year, or forever — an activated license stays activated.

Your license never stands between you and your own writing. Saving works from the moment Cozy opens, before any check has run, and a license server having a bad day can’t sign you out. Cozy only stops being licensed if a server it actually reached says clearly, and more than once, that the key is no longer valid.

If the license server ever went away permanently, there’s a signed key that unlocks Cozy with no server involved. Read more about what happens to your journal in the long run.

Do I pay for updates?

Cozy includes one year of updates, on every platform. After that year, your version keeps working forever, exactly as it is. If you want another year of updates later, it’s $24 — renew from your license page, where signing in takes only the email you bought with. It never renews on its own, and nothing stops working if you don’t.

Settings → About shows the date your updates run to, with a Renew button beside it. Once it passes, Cozy carries on exactly as it is and only new versions stop arriving. A quiet line in the sidebar says how many you’re behind until you wave it away, and renewing starts them again.

If you bought Cozy before this changed, your license was upgraded to a lifetime one automatically. You never pay for updates, or for Cozy for iPhone and iPad.

What about mobile?

Your Cozy license covers Cozy for iPhone and iPad. It’s a separate app, but not a second purchase.

Cozy for iPhone and iPad is free to download from the App Store. There’s no key to paste and no account to make — three steps and you’re in:

Open Settings in the iPhone or iPad app and choose to unlock Cozy.
Type the email address you bought Cozy with. I mail a six-digit code to it, usually within a minute.
Type the code in. Cozy unlocks. That’s it.

You do this once. The unlock is kept in your iPhone’s Keychain, so it survives reinstalling the app and follows you to your iPad — and from then on the phone app works offline forever, exactly like the desktop one.

If you never bought Cozy for the desktop, you can unlock the iPhone and iPad app on its own from inside it, as a one-time $19.99 purchase. That one is tied to your Apple Account rather than to your Cozy license, so it restores on any device that Apple Account is on.

Android comes after.

Either way the two apps read the same journal folder, so they stay in step through whatever sync service you use.