Frequently Asked Questions

Yes — what you download today is the free version: free for personal and
commercial use, no account, no licence key, no seat count. Install it on every
machine you work on, including at work and on client projects. Anything you build
with it is yours.

We're planning to launch optional paid plans in the future with some cool,
advanced developer features on top — the terminal itself stays free.

oterm is closed-source and distributed as a compiled binary; bundled open-source
components keep their own licences, listed in the app under Help → About.

macOS, Windows, and Linux — one codebase, consistent on all three. Every platform
ships a zip you can double-click: on macOS a universal oterm.app (Apple Silicon +
Intel) you drag to Applications; on Windows an installer (no admin needed) or a
portable zip; on Linux a zip holding the app folder — unzip and run.

Everything lives under $HOME/.oterm/ — one human-readable JSON config file, your
generated SSH keys, and logs. The config stores home locations as $HOME/… tokens,
so you can copy ~/.oterm to another machine and it just works. Set the
OTERM_APP_BASE_DIR environment variable (or the --app-base-dir flag) to relocate
the whole tree — a USB stick, a synced folder, or a throwaway test profile — and you
can even run two fully isolated oterm instances side by side. Config directories are
created 0700 and the config file 0600, written atomically.

oterm checks for updates on your schedule — daily, weekly, monthly, or never —
and never installs anything on its own; you always click. oterm --check-updates
reports availability with a scriptable exit code (0 = up to date, 10 = update
available, 1 = failed), so you can automate the check. New releases are also
announced through the newsletter — subscribe in the sidebar.

No account is required and there is no tracking built into your terminal work. The
only network call oterm makes on its own is the update check you schedule (which
you can set to Never). Security is a design rule, not an afterthought: every external
program oterm runs is spawned without a shell, private key bytes are never stored in
the config, passphrases never reach a log, and config files are written with
0700/0600 permissions.

Use the contact form, or Help → Share Feedback / Idea
right inside the app. When something fails, oterm shows a dialog you can read at your
own pace, select text from, and copy — including the error code — so a bug report is
one paste instead of a screenshot.