Terms of sale and licence

Last updated 7 October 2026

The short version

• Buy once, keep it. $29 buys a licence that never expires, for you on all of your Macs.
• Try it free first. 14 days, the whole app, no card. If you don’t buy, your notes stay readable.
• 30-day refunds, no reason needed.
• Updates are free for every 1.x version, and security fixes are free for at least 5 years.
• Your notes are yours. We claim no rights over anything you write.

This agreement

These terms are an agreement between you and Kyle Thacker(“we”, “us”), who makes Saturn. They apply when you download, try or buy Saturn. If you do not agree with them, please do not use the app. Where something here conflicts with a right the law gives you as a consumer, the law wins, and nothing here is meant to take those rights away.

Your licence

Buying Saturn gives you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use it. One licence covers one person on every Mac they use, for personal or work purposes. It does not expire, needs no account, and the app never contacts us to check that you are still entitled to run it.

Your licence is a signed file issued to the email address you bought with. Please keep it to yourself. You may not:

• share, sell, rent or publish your licence or the app;
• reverse engineer the app, or remove or get around its licence checks, except where the law allows this despite these terms;
• use the app to break the law or anyone else’s rights.

Saturn is licensed, not sold: we keep the rights to the app itself, its name and its design. Parts of it are open-source components, used under their own licences.

Your notes

Everything you write in Saturn belongs to you. We claim no rights over it and never receive it: your notes are Markdown files in a folder you choose, readable by any other app, now and if you stop using Saturn. You are responsible for what you keep in them, and for keeping backups of that folder, as with any folder that matters.

The free trial

Saturn is free and complete for 14 days, with no card and no account. When the trial ends without a purchase, the app becomes read-only: every note stays open, searchable, exportable and copyable, and the files in your folder are unaffected. What stops is writing new text in Saturn. Buying turns writing back on.

Buying

Checkout is run by Stripe, which is the merchant of record: Stripe sells you the licence on our behalf, takes payment, calculates and collects any sales tax or VAT, and issues your receipt. Stripe’s own terms apply to the payment. Your card details never reach us.

Prices are in US dollars, with tax added at checkout where it applies. Saturn is $29 at launch and will rise to $49. A licence bought at the launch price is not affected by the increase, and a price change never applies to a licence you already own.

Your licence is delivered as soon as payment succeeds: the app activates by itself, and a copy is emailed to you so you can recover it later.

Refunds

If Saturn is not for you, email support@saturnnotes.com within 30 days of buying and we will refund you in full. You do not have to give a reason. A refunded licence stops being valid.

This is in addition to any statutory right you have where you live, never instead of it. Consumers in the EU and UK have a right to withdraw from a purchase of digital content within 14 days; because you can download Saturn immediately, that right can end once you start using it, but our 30-day refund applies either way.

Updates and the support period

Every 1.x update is free. Your licence carries a support end date, at least 5 years after you buy; it is shown to you before you pay and recorded on the licence itself.

Until that date, security updates and macOS compatibility fixes are free — including after a future major version ships. A future major version may charge for new features; it will never charge for a security fix.

If a Saturn 2.0 ships, it will be a separate purchase at roughly half the full price, and free to anyone who bought 1.x within the six months before its release. Your 1.x licence keeps working either way.

Saturn updates itself through its built-in updater. You can turn automatic updates off in Settings. We cannot promise any particular feature in a future version, or that a future version of macOS will not break something before we can fix it.

Other services

Saturn works alongside services we do not run, under their own terms: Apple’s iCloud Drive, if you sync your vault with it; AI apps you connect through Assistants; and websites you save as links. We are not responsible for those services, for what they do with what you give them, or for their availability.

Warranty

We work hard to make Saturn reliable, but it is provided “as is”. To the extent the law allows, we make no warranties beyond those the law gives you and does not let us exclude — including any implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. If you are a consumer, you keep your statutory rights: in the EU and UK, for example, digital content must be as described, fit for purpose and of satisfactory quality, and you are entitled to a repair or refund if it is not.

Liability

To the extent the law allows, our total liability to you for anything connected with Saturn is limited to what you paid for your licence, and we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, such as lost profits or lost data. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law — for example, for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.

The practical point matters more than the legal one: your notes are plain files in a folder you control, so if Saturn ever fails, your writing is still there in a format every other app can read.

Ending the licence

You can stop using Saturn whenever you like. If you seriously break these terms — for example by publishing your licence or selling copies of the app — your licence ends. Either way, your notes remain yours, in your folder.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms for future purchases and versions. The terms that apply to your purchase are the ones published on the day you bought; we will not change what you bought after the fact. The date at the top shows which version this is.

General

If any part of these terms cannot be enforced, the rest still applies. If we do not enforce a term straight away, we have not given it up. These terms, with the privacy policy, are the whole agreement about Saturn. If you are a consumer, you can bring a claim in the courts where you live, and the mandatory consumer laws of your country continue to protect you.

Contact

Kyle Thacker — support@saturnnotes.com. A person reads every message.