Last updated 2026-08-10

Terms & Licence Agreement

Buying a ZHiCK plugin gives you a licence to use it on a set number of machines, with free updates. Nothing you make with it belongs to me. Try before you buy — the trial is the complete plugin, because purchases are final and not refunded. If a licence lapses the plugin keeps working: it watermarks the image rather than failing, so a licensing problem can never break a render.

1. Who you are agreeing with

These terms are between you and Thanadet Sribandit (sole trader), 66/1 Moo 8, Nong Waeng Subdistrict, Kanthararom District, Sisaket 33130, Thailand — referred to below as “ZHiCK”. They cover the ZHiCK plugins, the ZHiCK Hub application, and this website.

Purchases are processed by Stripe on my behalf. The sale is made by me, and this agreement governs both the sale and your use of the software.

2. What you are buying, and which licence you need

A licence to use the software, not the software itself. You may use it commercially, on client work, and on paid productions, with no royalty and no per-render fee.

Everything you produce with it is yours. ZHiCK claims no rights over your images, comps, projects or renders, and no credit is required.

There are two kinds of licence, and which one you need comes down to who pays for it rather than what you do with it.

  • Individual — bought by one person, with their own money. Use it on client work, commercials, features, anything: there is no restriction whatsoever on the work itself. What it does not cover is a company buying it for you, or paying you back for it afterwards.
  • Studio — bought by a company, covering up to the number of machines stated. If the cost comes out of a business account this is the one that applies, whether it ends up running on five machines or on one.

Dividing them this way is what keeps the individual price where it is. If your circumstances change after you buy — you join a studio, or a client takes over the cost — email and the difference will be settled sensibly.

3. Machines and seats

Each licence covers a stated number of machines. Activating a machine takes one seat; the licence file that gets written is tied to that specific computer and works offline from then on — the plugin never contacts the network.

  • Re-activating a machine you have already activated does not consume a second seat. Reinstalling, or losing the licence file, costs you nothing.
  • Reinstalling Windows changes the machine's identity, so it will need activating again. If that leaves you short of seats, ask and it will be sorted out.
  • A licence covers you, or the company named on it — see section 2. It may not be resold, sublicensed, shared with another company, or bundled into something else without written permission.

4. Releasing a machine — read this one

You can release a seat at any time, from the hub or from your account, and use it on a different computer. It is worth being exact about what that does, because the honest description and the convenient one differ.

Releasing a seat frees your right to activate another machine. It does not switch off the licence file already installed on the machine you released. That file is signed and validated offline, so there is no way to reach in and revoke it — the same design decision that lets the plugin keep working on a render farm with no network.

In practice this means you are free to move between machines as often as you need, and you are trusted not to treat a released machine as a spare licence. Where a licence carries a renewal date (section 5), files on machines you no longer use stop working when that date passes.

5. How long a licence lasts

  • Every licence sold today is perpetual. One machine or five: no expiry date, no renewal, no check-in. They keep working whether or not ZHiCK still exists.
  • If a licence ever carries a renewal date, the shop page and your receipt say so before you pay, and the hub renews it in the background at no cost while the licence is in good standing — well ahead of expiry, so a machine can be offline for weeks and never notice. Nothing on sale works that way at present.
  • Subscriptions run for as long as they are paid, with a short grace period after a failed payment.
  • Trials run for the stated number of days. One per machine, per plugin.

A renewal date, where one exists, is there so that seat counts stay truthful over years of machine changes — not to create a subscription by the back door. It costs nothing and happens without you doing anything.

6. Updates

Updates are free. Buying a plugin entitles you to its updates without paying again, and the hub installs them and refreshes your licence in the same action — you press Update and never see the word licence.

Licences state the highest major version they cover. When a major version arrives that goes beyond it, existing licences are re-issued to include it rather than customers being asked to buy again.

7. What happens without a valid licence

The plugin still loads and still renders the full effect — every control keeps working — with a faint ZHiCK STUDIO watermark tiled across the output. It does not disappear from the node list, refuse to open your comp, or fail a render.

This is deliberate. A licensing problem discovered at 2am should cost you an obviously marked frame, never a failed farm job and never a frame that is quietly wrong. The same applies after a trial ends, after a refund, and after a revocation.

8. Refunds — try before you buy

Purchases are final and are not refunded. That is only fair because you can try the whole thing first: the trial is the complete plugin with nothing held back, running on your own footage, for as long as the trial lasts. Nothing about the paid version differs except the watermark. Once a trial has ended, controls that would hand you a result the watermark cannot reach — a bake that writes the effect out as plain numbers, for instance — stop working until there is a licence. While the trial is running they behave exactly as they do once paid for.

So the answer to “will it work for my shot” is available before any money changes hands, which is the only honest basis for a policy like this one. Use the trial.

This does not remove rights you have by law. Consumer protection rules in your country may still give you a refund in specific circumstances — most commonly where the software is faulty or was misdescribed — and nothing here overrides that. If the plugin does not do what this site says it does, say so and it will be put right.

If a refund is issued for any reason, the licence stops being valid and the plugin returns to watermarking — as in section 7, nothing breaks and nothing you made disappears.

9. What you may not do

  • Redistribute, resell or publish the plugin binaries or the licence files.
  • Share a licence key with people outside your organisation.
  • Remove, disable or work around the watermark or the licence check.
  • Use the software where it is unlawful to do so.

Reverse engineering is not prohibited where the law gives you that right — in the EU and UK, for interoperability, it does. Nothing here is intended to take away a right you have by statute.

10. Warranty and liability

The software is provided as it is. It is tested and used in real work, but no software is promised to be free of defects or to be fit for every pipeline, and no guarantee is made that it will suit a particular project.

To the extent the law allows, ZHiCK is not liable for lost work, lost time, lost profit or consequential loss, and total liability for any claim is limited to what you paid for the licence in question. Consumer rights that cannot be excluded are not excluded.

Keep backups and check your frames. That is true of every tool in a pipeline, including this one.

11. Ending the agreement

The licence ends if you break these terms in a way that matters and do not put it right after being asked. Section 7 still applies: the plugin watermarks rather than breaking, so nothing you have built stops opening.

12. Law, and changes to these terms

This agreement is governed by the law of Thailand, and its courts have jurisdiction — which does not remove any protection you have under the mandatory consumer law of the country you live in.

These terms may change for future purchases. The terms that apply to a licence are the ones published when you bought it; a later version does not reach back and change what you already own.

Questions go to zhickstudio@gmail.com.