How licensing works

Your key is a download credential

The licence key you got at checkout lets you download theme files from us. There is no key stored in your theme settings — nothing to paste into the editor, and nothing to lose.

The theme also checks its licence, and here is exactly how

Once per visit at most, after your page has finished painting, the theme asks our licence service whether this licence is current. The answer is cached for three days, so in practice this is one request per shopper every few days.

The rules it follows are fixed, and they are the reason this is safe to have in a storefront:

• the request runs at idle, after first paint, so it can never delay or block a render;
• it never modifies anything the theme already rendered — the notice described below is drawn over the page, and removing it restores the shop exactly;
• every failure means fully licensed — our servers down, a timeout, a bad signature, no answer at all. Our outage cannot become yours.

Only one answer changes anything a shopper sees, and it has to be a signed answer, for your shop, saying the licence was revoked or refunded.

When your storefront shows a licence notice

Only when our service returns a signed answer, bound to your shop, saying the licence is no longer current. In practice that is one of three things:

• a monthly licence that has lapsed — you cancelled and the period you paid for has ended;
• a refund — a full refund revokes the licence it paid for;
• a revocation by us, which we do not do without telling you first.

A failed card does not do this. A payment problem opens a fourteen-day grace window, and grace shows nothing on the storefront at all.

A lifetime licence never lapses. If you want a theme that keeps working whatever happens to your subscription, to us, or to this website, that is the one to buy.

Why it is built this way rather than not at all

A licence check is worth having only if it cannot hurt the person who paid. Themes that check a licence before rendering hand a third party a switch over somebody else's revenue, and take storefronts down on the day their own server has a bad one. The rules above exist so that this one cannot: it is an appended notice painted at idle, removed as cleanly as it was added, and every one of our own failures resolves in your favour.

What a licence covers

One licence covers one live Shopify storefront, and the key activates on up to three stores so that storefront can be staged and moved. You may:

• install it on that store, on as many unpublished preview copies as you like
• keep a staging store and a migration target activated at the same time
• modify the code however you want, including hiring a developer to do it
• keep using it commercially for as long as you want

You may not resell, redistribute, or repackage the theme, modified or not. A licence bought for a client store belongs to that store.

Running several live stores? Buy a licence per store, or email us about agency pricing.

Activations

Three. Your licence page shows how many are in use — the count you see there is the real one.

Three is meant as a live store, a staging copy, and one spare for a migration, which is the shape most shops actually need. It is not three unrelated shops; that is the line in the licence.

If you run out, deactivate an old one yourself in the customer portal. You do not need to contact us.

What happens when you cancel

Cancelling a monthly subscription stops future charges and leaves everything alone until the period you have already paid for runs out. At that point the licence lapses: the download stops working, and a published Hullara theme shows the notice described above until you resubscribe.

A monthly licence is a rental, and this is the part of it worth understanding before you buy. Your files, your customisations and your content are untouched either way — but the theme will say, on your storefront, that its licence is not active.

If you want the theme to be yours whatever happens later, buy the lifetime licence. You can do it at any time, including after cancelling, and you pay the difference rather than the full price — email us.

Refunds

Thirty days, no argument. Email us from the address you paid with.

We would rather refund someone who is unhappy than have them stuck with a theme that does not suit them. Refunded lifetime licences are revoked.

Tracing

Each download is stamped with the account that requested it — in a LICENCE.txt at the root of the zip and a comment at the top of layout/theme.liquid. It is inert: it changes nothing about how the theme behaves and removing it breaks nothing.

It exists so that if a copy turns up on a piracy forum we can tell whose it was. Honest buyers never notice it.