Hotspot Guard Terms of Service

Effective date: August 10, 2026

These terms are an agreement between you and TinyNeed, the publisher of Hotspot Guard. By downloading or using the app you accept them. If you do not accept them, do not use the app.

What Hotspot Guard does

Hotspot Guard is a macOS menu bar app that measures how much data each app uses over a metered connection, warns you when one crosses a limit you set, and can step in automatically if you ask it to. It reports what macOS reports. Treat its figures as a close guide, not as your carrier's meter: your carrier's numbers are the ones you are billed on, and only they are authoritative for any dispute with your carrier.

Automatic action is off by default. When you turn it on, you are asking the app to pause, stop, or freeze processes on your Mac. Software that is interrupted can lose unsaved work, and the app cannot know what a given process was in the middle of. Choose the level of response you are comfortable with, and do not enable automatic action for work you cannot afford to have interrupted.

What is free

Hotspot Guard is free, forever: per-app measurement, per-app limits, the monthly budget and forecast, the built-in knowledge pack, the record of what the guard did, the optional update check, the optional online explanation lookup, and one plan profile. There is no time limit, no account, and no trial that expires.

Hotspot Guard Plus

• Price: US$24.99, paid once. Not a subscription; nothing renews and nothing is charged again. Depending on where you buy from, tax may be added at checkout and the price may be shown in your local currency; the price displayed at checkout governs.
• What it unlocks: multiple plan profiles — a separate monthly ledger for each connection you use, with one-click switching and per-connection memory.
• Devices: up to 3 Macs at a time. You can release a Mac from within the app to free a slot.
• Term: the license does not expire. It covers the current version and any later version of Hotspot Guard that carries the same Plus unlock.

Delivery and activation

Your license key is emailed to the address you give at checkout, normally within minutes. Enter it in the app under Settings › Plus (Settings › About on 1.2.0 and earlier, which links straight to it). If the email has not arrived within an hour, check your spam folder and then write to hello@tinyneed.com — a missing key is our problem to fix, not yours.

License checks and going offline

An activated Mac revalidates the license about every 14 days. If that check cannot be made — you are offline, or our service is down — the unlock is kept for a further 30 days from the last successful check. A revalidation can only keep an existing activation alive; it never creates one.

If more than that passes without a successful check, Plus locks and the app says so; it unlocks again by itself as soon as a check succeeds. A lapse never takes your data. Profiles you already created stay in place, and you can keep switching between them and deleting them — only creating a new profile requires an active unlock. Everything in the free tier is unaffected in every case.

Payment and refunds

Purchases are sold and processed by Creem (Armitage Labs OÜ, Telliskivi tn 57b/1, Tallinn, Estonia) acting as merchant of record. Creem is the seller of record for the transaction, issues your receipt, and handles payment, tax, and refunds; its terms apply to the payment itself.

Refunds: 14 days, no argument required. If Plus is not what you expected, write to hello@tinyneed.com within 14 days of purchase and we will have the payment refunded in full. You do not need to give a reason. After 14 days we will still read the email and do what is fair, but the guarantee no longer binds us. A refunded license is deactivated.

What you may not do

Do not resell, sublicense, or publish your license key, and do not attempt to bypass the activation limit. We may deactivate a key that is being shared publicly. Everything else — using it at work, on your own machines, alongside other tools — is fine.

Warranty and liability

Hotspot Guard is provided as is, without warranty of any kind. To the extent the law allows, TinyNeed is not liable for data-plan overage charges, for work lost when a process is paused or stopped, or for any indirect or consequential loss. Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including for fraud. Where our liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to the amount you paid for Plus.

These limits do not affect statutory consumer rights you may have where you live, including any right of withdrawal for digital purchases in your jurisdiction.

Privacy

What the app does and does not send is described in the Hotspot Guard privacy policy, which forms part of these terms.

Changes

We may update these terms; the effective date above changes when we do. A change never applies retroactively to a purchase already made.

Contact

TinyNeed — hello@tinyneed.com. We reply within three business days.