No. If someone hides a message in plain text or an emoji, you read it for free in the decoder right above — no app, no account, nothing. The paid app is for creating messages, hiding them inside images, and locking them with a password.

Properly. Set a password and the message is sealed with AES-256-GCM, with the key stretched through PBKDF2 (210k iterations) — the same building blocks banks and password managers use. It all runs on your machine; the plaintext never touches a server, because there is no server.

A single Windows executable (.exe). No install wizard, no background services — you open it and it runs in the command line. For now it’s Windows-only: that’s where it’s built and tested.

It isn’t. Compiled, packed executables like this routinely trip heuristic scanners (Windows Defender especially) with a false positive. Every release goes through VirusTotal so you can verify it yourself before opening it.

Don’t. Each license is tied to your machine’s hardware ID (HWID): one key, one PC. If the same key turns up on several machines it gets flagged and banned — and there are no refunds, so keep it to yourself.

Neither. You pay once and it’s yours for good, updates included. Since it’s a digital download that unlocks instantly, all sales are final — the fine print lives in the Terms.