How Access Works

Access is tied to your GitHub account. There is no separate Wintty account, no licence key to lose, and no activation limit.

Any donation, of any amount, unlocks the Sponsor tier. There is no minimum. A one time gift of a dollar gets you the signed build and automatic updates.

Pro is $6.99 as a single one time sponsorship, and it covers a year from the day you sponsor.

Any recurring sponsorship also gets Pro. GitHub's cheapest recurring tier is $1.00 a month, which comes to more over a year than the one time price, so every subscription clears the bar. If you would rather support the project monthly than in one go, you are not giving up anything by doing so.

Note

GitHub reports a one time sponsorship's amount in the same field it uses for monthly tiers, so the amount alone cannot tell $6.99 once from $6.99 a month. Whether a sponsorship is one time or recurring is what decides which of the two ladders above applies to it.

Pro Enterprise is not sold through GitHub Sponsors. Everything on this page assumes one person, one GitHub account, one sponsorship, which is not how an organisation buys or deploys software. Sponsors cannot express invoices, VAT or seat counts either. Enterprise is arranged directly instead: if the model described on this page does not fit your organisation, we will work out something that does. Get in touch with @polyMatto on X, or by email, which is easy enough to find, and see Pro Enterprise for what that covers.

The token carries the list of channels you are entitled to, and nothing else decides what you can fetch. A Sponsor token lists the stable and tip channels. A Pro token adds the Pro Desktop and Pro Legacy channels on top of those. Build storage is not public, so a request without a token that lists the channel does not get the file.

This is also why there is no OSS download. There is no channel for it to be served on. The OSS tier is the source tree, and the way to get it is to build it.

A one time sponsorship stays valid for 365 days from the day it was made. GitHub marks one time sponsorships inactive almost immediately, long before the period they paid for is up, so it is counted from the date you sponsored rather than from that flag. You get what you paid for.

A recurring sponsorship is valid while it is active. Cancel it and access stops at the end of it.

When access ends you stop being issued tokens for the channels you had, which means no further downloads and no further updates.

The build you already installed is yours to keep. It does not stop working, expire, or start nagging you. What stops is the flow of new versions, not the copy on your machine.

Anyone who sponsors before 31 December 2026 keeps Pro permanently, at whatever amount they gave.

Founding sponsorship is open until 31 December 2026.

That grant does not expire, does not depend on the sponsorship still being active, and does not change if prices change later. If you sponsored early and then cancelled years ago, you still have Pro. If the price of Pro goes up, it does not go up for you.

This is deliberate, and it is worth saying why. Pricing is not final. People who back a project before it has shipped anything are taking a risk that later buyers are not, and the fair way to settle that is for them to keep the terms they signed up under rather than be quietly moved onto new ones.

Every published build is signed by Ship Digital Ltd using Azure Artifact Signing, and the signature is timestamped to RFC 3161. The timestamp matters: it means the signature stays verifiable after the signing certificate itself expires, so a build you downloaded today still checks out years from now.

You can see the publisher on the Windows security prompt before you run an installer, and in the file's digital signature properties afterwards. If a Wintty build does not show that publisher, it did not come from this project.