Terms of Service
What you agree to when you download Sidelong or buy a Pro licence. It is a short document, because Sidelong is a small piece of software that runs on your own Mac.
Last updated
Who you are dealing with
Sidelong is an independent project, published under its own name by the people who write it. There is no reseller and no middleman: write to hello@thesidelong.app and a person answers.
When you buy Sidelong Pro, you buy it from us. Stripe processes the payment on our behalf and handles your card details; the seller is Sidelong, the licence key comes from us, and these terms are the agreement that covers it.
By downloading, installing or using Sidelong you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not install it.
What Sidelong is
Sidelong is a native macOS app. It requires macOS 14 or later on an Apple Silicon Mac, and it is distributed as a signed and notarized DMG from our own domain.
The core is free, for good: usage windows for every agent, live sessions, exact jumps back to the terminal that owns a session, CPU and memory in the notch, the gestures, every display and three languages.
Three things need a Pro licence: pull requests with CI and two-click merge, local ports with their live log and Stop, and answering questions and permission requests from the surface. All three are unlocked for the first three days after you first launch the app. When those days end, the free core keeps working exactly as before.
The licence you get
Sidelong Pro is a one-time purchase, not a subscription. Nothing renews, and there is nothing to cancel.
Buying gives you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to install and use Sidelong on the Macs you own or control, for personal or for work. One purchase covers up to 3 Macs at a time, and releasing a Mac in Settings › Pro gives the slot back, so replacing a machine costs you nothing. Sidelong itself — its code, its name and its icon — stays ours; you are buying the right to use it, not the software.
- Do not sell, rent, sublicense or redistribute Sidelong or your licence key.
- Do not publish your key, or share it with people outside your household or company.
- Do not work around the licence check, or modify the app to unlock the Pro features.
- Do not reverse engineer the app, except where the law of your country says you may.
- Do not remove or alter the copyright, trademark and licence notices inside it.
Licence keys, activation and releasing a Mac
Your key is generated by our own licence server for your order and emailed to you, usually within a minute of payment. Paste it into Sidelong under Settings › Pro, or open the link in the message.
The app activates the key once against our licence server at https://license.thesidelong.app, sending the key and the name of your Mac so that you can tell your activations apart. There is no credential hidden inside the app: what authorises the request is the key you bought. After that it revalidates quietly about every 30 days. With no network, what is already stored keeps working — only an explicit refusal from the server locks the Pro features.
You can release a Mac at any time in Settings › Pro, which frees that slot for another machine.
Treat the key like a password. If you lose it, write to hello@thesidelong.app from the address you bought with and we will resend it. We cannot help once a key has been published and used by other people.
Price and payment
The current price is the one shown on this site, charged in US dollars. Stripe takes the payment on our behalf.
We can change the price of Sidelong Pro at any time. A change never applies backwards: the price you paid is the price of the licence you already own.
Updates and support
Updates are included at no extra cost. The app reads a small manifest on our own domain and tells you when a newer version exists; it never installs anything behind your back.
If a future version ever becomes a separate paid product, your key keeps working with the version line it unlocked. We will not turn a one-time purchase into a subscription.
Support is email, at hello@thesidelong.app, answered by the people who write the app. We aim to reply within two business days. There is no service-level agreement and no phone line.
What Sidelong does on your Mac, and what is yours
Sidelong needs Accessibility permission to read where your windows are, and it explains that on first launch. It writes hooks into the settings files of the agents you choose only after you say yes in the welcome window, and it backs each file up before the first write.
The actions you take from a Sidelong widget are your actions. Allowing or denying a command, merging a pull request, stopping a local server, ending a process: Sidelong is the surface, you are the one deciding. Read what you are approving, exactly as you would in the terminal.
You are responsible for complying with the terms of the tools Sidelong reads, and for what your agents do with the access you give them.
The tools Sidelong reads are not ours
Sidelong reads what is already installed on your Mac: Claude Code and Claude Desktop, Codex, Antigravity, Warp, Maestri, Orca, and the gh CLI you signed in to. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any of them, and their names and marks belong to their owners.
Those tools change. When one of them changes a file format, an API or a hook contract, a Sidelong feature can stop working until we catch up. We fix that as fast as we can, and the refund policy is there for the times we cannot.
Availability
Sidelong runs on your Mac and keeps working without us. The download, the update manifest and the licence server are hosted on our own domain and offered as they are, with no promise of uptime. If the licence server cannot be reached, an activated copy carries on: only an explicit refusal locks anything.
We may add, change or retire features. If we ever stop publishing Sidelong, the copy you installed and the key you activated keep working: we will not switch the app off remotely.
No warranty
Sidelong is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, to the fullest extent the law allows. We do not warrant that it will be free of defects, that it will suit a particular purpose, or that it will never miss a session or misread a limit.
If you are a consumer, the mandatory rights your country gives you stay intact. Nothing on this page removes them.
Liability
To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss: work lost, profit lost, data lost, a pull request merged by mistake, a process stopped at the wrong moment.
Where we are liable, our total liability for any claim is limited to the amount you paid for your Sidelong licence. Nothing here limits liability for fraud, for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for anything else that cannot be limited by law.
Ending it
You can stop using Sidelong whenever you like: quit it and move it to the Trash.
We can end a licence that was obtained fraudulently, whose payment was reversed by a chargeback, or that is being resold or shared publicly. If that happens the Pro features lock at the next check, and the free core keeps working.
Changes to these terms
When these terms change we replace this page and update the date at the top. Your purchase is governed by the terms published on the day you bought.
Law and disputes
These terms are governed by Portuguese law, and the courts of Portugal have jurisdiction — except where consumer law gives you the right to bring a claim where you live.
Before anything formal, write to hello@thesidelong.app. Almost everything is settled that way.