Activating your Spectersync Core license

Spectersync Core is no longer sold to new customers. If you already have a subscription, it keeps syncing and keeps getting updates — this guide is for you. Unlocking Core is a single step: you paste the license key you received when you subscribed. This guide covers where that goes, how to use your license across more than one Mac, and what happens when you are offline.

Official app versus open source

Spectersync Core is the paid official app: signed builds, automatic updates, license activation, and priority support. The open-source project is free forever on GitHub for users who want to inspect, fork, or build it themselves. Once Pro is active, sync is unlimited across every connected site and platform.

Entering your key

Your Spectersync Core subscription comes with a license key. To activate, open Specter’s settings and find the License section, paste your key, and confirm. Specter checks the key against the store, and once it validates, sync unlocks. Your folder setup carries straight over; activating does not reset or move anything.

If you prefer the command line, the bundled ghost-sync CLI exposes the same thing: ghost-sync license activate <key> to unlock, ghost-sync license status to see your current tier and details, and ghost-sync license deactivate to release the machine.

Using your license on more than one Mac

A Spectersync Core license can be activated on up to two Macs, which covers the common case of a laptop and a desktop. Each activation takes one of those two slots. If you replace a machine or want to move your license elsewhere, deactivate it on the old Mac first — from the License settings or with ghost-sync license deactivate — which frees the slot so you can activate on the new one. There is nothing to email support about for an ordinary machine swap; deactivating returns the slot to you.

What happens offline

Specter validates your license with the store periodically, but it does not need a live connection every time you sync. After a successful validation it keeps working offline for a grace period of about a week, so a flight, a dead connection, or a quiet weekend never locks you out of your own blog. Once you are back online it re-validates quietly in the background. In normal use you will never notice this; it only matters to know that being offline for a day or two changes nothing.

If something looks wrong

If your key will not activate, the usual culprits are a stray space when pasting or trying to use the key on a third machine when both slots are already taken — deactivate one of the existing machines and try again. If you have a Core subscription and cannot find your key, or you have hit a genuine snag, that is what priority support is for; email support@spectersync.com and include the email on your subscription. The sync engine itself is free and open-source if you’d rather not maintain a Core subscription. Spectersync Core itself is non-refundable; see the billing answers for details.

Once activated, the natural next steps are the ones you bought Pro to do at scale: editing posts with AI, bulk SEO edits, and refreshing old posts across your whole archive.