What you get, and what we owe you.

Two contracts, two parties. Keeping them apart matters, because your rights differ.

The licence

With Roman Moor, Roman Moor, Milbertshofener Straße 54, 80807 München, Germany — the author of Galley. These terms govern it.

The purchase

With Polar Software, Inc. as merchant of record. Polar takes the payment, handles the tax for your country and issues the invoice; their terms govern the sale itself.

Where the two could conflict on something we promised you — a refund, in particular — we treat our promise as binding on us regardless of what the payment route says.

These terms apply to consumers and to businesses. Where a clause is limited to one or the other, it says so. Your own general terms and conditions do not apply, even if we do not object to them.

Galley is a desktop application and command-line tool for type designers: it opens font sources and binaries, audits them, diffs two versions, reviews kerning, proofs shaped text, and can write kerning, spacing and outline changes back into your source files. It runs on your computer.

• —Free, permanently: opening and inspecting fonts, the audit checks, verdicts and audit report export, passport verification, and viewing any Galley report. No account, no time limit, no nagging. This is a gift, not a trial, and it does not expire.
• —Free, for 30 days: every fresh installation unlocks everything — diff and history, kerning review and writeback, proofs, signing — so you can judge the paid features on your own fonts. No card is taken, so there is nothing to cancel and nothing to charge on day 31.
• —Paid, once: a perpetual licence for those features. Not a subscription. There is no recurring payment anywhere in this product.

While Galley is in closed beta, downloads are limited to invited testers, and any performance, availability or feature statement is a description of the current build rather than a guaranteed characteristic.

On payment you receive a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive licence to use Galley for any purpose, commercial work included, in the version generation you bought and every update within it.

• —Per person, not per machine. A licence belongs to one named human being, who may install it on every computer they personally use — studio, laptop, home, virtual machine, CI runner. We do not count devices and there is nothing counting them.
• —Offline. The licence is a signed file. It is verified on your machine, without a network call, without an account, and without an activation server that could ever be switched off.
• —Perpetual means perpetual. It does not lapse, expire, phone home or degrade. If you stop paying attention to us entirely, the software you bought keeps working.
• —Team licences cover four named people. Seats may be reassigned when someone joins or leaves; they are not a pool to be shared simultaneously by more people than there are seats.
• —Students, educators and open-licensed font projects get the full licence free. Ask, with your school affiliation or your project link. Verification is human, lenient, and does not become a licence audit later.

• —Publishing, reselling, renting, sublicensing or lending your licence file, or making it available to people it was not issued to.
• —Removing or circumventing the licence check, or distributing anything that does.
• —Redistributing Galley itself, modified or not, as your own product or as part of one.
• —Using Galley's internals to build a competing product.

What you may do, we do not pretend to forbid: everything §§ 69d and 69e UrhG permit — backup copies, observing and testing the program's function, and decompilation for interoperability — remains permitted, and no clause here limits it.

Sharing a licence with a colleague is a breach, and we deal with it by writing to you like adults, not by shutting anything down remotely. There is no remote kill switch, because there is no remote anything.

We claim no right of any kind in the typefaces, sources, projects, reports, proofs or exports you make with Galley, and we never receive a copy of them.

Reports and passports you produce are yours to publish, sell, attach to invoices, send to clients or put in a repository. They can be opened and verified by anyone, forever, without a licence and without our involvement. Nothing in this document gives us a licence to your work, and no future version of it will.

• —Verification stays free, unconditionally. Checking a Galley passport or report — in the application, the command line or the browser — will never require a licence, never require an account, and never be moved behind a paid tier. A trust artifact you have to buy a tool to read is worthless, and we will not make ours worthless.
• —No telemetry, ever. Not anonymised, not aggregated, not opt-out. If we ever want to know something about how Galley is used, we will ask you in words.
• —No subscription, ever, for what you already bought. A licence purchased under these terms will not be converted into a rental.
• —If Galley is discontinued, the last build is unlocked. Should we stop developing and selling Galley altogether, we will publish — within six months of the last sale — a final version that does not require a licence file. This does not apply where Galley passes to someone who carries on selling and supporting it: a change of hands is not a shutdown. Your work should not depend on our continued existence, and offline software is the only kind that can honestly make that promise.

Galley modifies your source files. Kerning, spacing and outline edits are written directly into your .glyphs and UFO sources — on an idle pause after you stop working, with no Save button and no confirmation dialog. That is a deliberate design, and you need to know it before you point Galley at work you cannot lose.

Galley writes by splicing bytes rather than re-saving the file, precisely so that the rest of your data survives untouched, and it takes an automatic snapshot before a write so the way back is a version rather than an undo stack. It is still your responsibility to keep your sources in version control or in a backup you trust. Do that. Any tool that writes to a file can, in some circumstance nobody predicted, write the wrong thing.

Beta builds are pre-release, are not code-signed, and may contain defects. Features may change or disappear between beta builds. Use them on real work with the same care you would give any pre-release tool.

None of this limits the liability set out in §13 — in particular not for damage caused intentionally or by gross negligence. It is a warning because it is true, not a disclaimer dressed as one.

Prices shown on this site are in euro. Because Polar is the seller of record, the final amount — including any VAT or sales tax due where you live, and a business VAT number if you have one — is shown and calculated at checkout, and the invoice comes from them.

Roman Moor is a small business under § 19 UStG and charges no VAT on its own invoices; where Polar charges tax as merchant of record, it does so in its own name and remits it in your country.

Payment is due at purchase. The licence file is issued immediately by email once payment clears.

Within 30 days of purchase, ask for your money back and you get it. No reason required, no form, no interrogation, and no exception for having used the software — using it is how you find out whether it earns its price.

Write to contact@galleyink.com with the order number. We arrange the refund with Polar; it is paid back over the route you paid by. The licence stops being valid on refund, and any report or passport you already produced stays valid — those are yours.

This promise is voluntary and larger than the law requires. It runs alongside your statutory rights and takes nothing from them; where the statutory right is more favourable in a particular case, that one applies.

If you are a consumer in the EU, you have a statutory right to withdraw from a distance contract within 14 days. For a purchase made through Polar as merchant of record, that right runs against Polar, and their withdrawal instructions — presented at checkout — apply. The statutory instruction is reproduced here in full for the case that you contract with us directly.

Widerrufsbelehrung

Muster-Widerrufsformular

In English

You may withdraw from the contract within fourteen days of concluding it, without giving any reason, by an unambiguous statement — a letter or an email to the address above. Sending the notice before the deadline is enough to meet it. We then refund every payment received from you within fourteen days of the notice arriving, by the same means you paid, at no charge to you.

Updates within your version generation — fixes, improvements and new features — are included for as long as that generation is maintained, at no further cost.

When a new major version ships, you may upgrade at a discount or keep using the one you own, indefinitely. You will never be locked out of the version you paid for, and declining an upgrade will never disable anything you already have.

We may discontinue distribution or support of a version. That has no effect on your right to keep using the copy you hold.

For paid licences, the statutory warranty for digital products applies (§§ 327 ff., 434 ff. BGB), including the duty to keep the product free of defects and to supply updates as §§ 327f BGB requires. If Galley does not do what these pages and the product description say it does, tell us: we will fix it, or refund you.

The free tier and the 30-day full-feature period are provided free of charge and without warranty of any particular characteristic. That does not touch our liability under §13 or any mandatory statutory right.

For businesses, the limitation period for warranty claims is one year from delivery; this does not apply to claims for damages, to fraudulently concealed defects, or where a longer period is mandatory.

We are fully liable — without any limit in these terms — for damage caused intentionally or by gross negligence, for injury to life, body or health, under the German Product Liability Act, and where we have given a guarantee or fraudulently concealed a defect.

For slight negligence, we are liable only where we breach a cardinal obligation — a duty whose fulfilment makes performing the contract possible at all and on whose observance you may routinely rely — and then limited to the foreseeable damage typical of this kind of contract. All further liability for slight negligence is excluded.

Back up your work. Where a claim concerns loss of data, our liability is limited to the effort of recovering it that would have been needed had you kept backups appropriate to the value of the work. Galley writes to your sources; version control or a backup is the reasonable precaution, and §7 tells you so before you ever get here.

Galley reports what it finds in your files. It is an instrument, not a judgement: it does not decide whether a typeface is finished, correct, or fit to release, and a clean report is not a warranty of quality by us. Those decisions stay with you, which is also why every finding is presented for a human to weigh rather than as a verdict to obey.

Support is by email, from the person who wrote the software, in English or German, at contact@galleyink.com. We aim to answer within two business days. There is no ticket system, no tiered support plan and no upsell — it is included in the price and in the free tier alike.

A bug report with a file that reproduces it is the fastest route to a fix. Files you send us for that purpose are used only to reproduce and fix the bug, are never shared, and are deleted when it is closed — say the word and they are deleted sooner.

Galley signs passports and seals reports. Those artifacts assert something to the person who receives them — that this file is what it claims to be, checked by this tool, at this moment.

Do not sign a passport for work whose provenance you cannot honestly assert, and do not alter a report to say something the tool did not find.

Beyond that: do not use Galley to infringe someone else's rights, and do not use it where export control or sanctions law forbids you to. Breach of this clause entitles us to terminate the licence for cause.

The licence is perpetual and does not need to be renewed or cancelled — there is nothing to cancel, because nothing recurs.

We may terminate for cause only in the case of a serious, unremedied breach of §4 or §15, after warning you in writing and giving you the chance to put it right. Termination for cause is the only mechanism by which a licence ends, and it is not a technical one: it does not and cannot reach into your machine.

The terms you bought under are the terms you keep. A change published later does not apply retroactively to a licence already sold.

We may amend these terms for future purchases, for legal or technical reasons. If a change ever needs to reach an existing licence, we will ask you and you may decline — declining leaves your licence exactly as it was.

German law applies, excluding the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. If you are a consumer, this choice never deprives you of the mandatory protections of the law of the country you live in (Art. 6 (2) Rome I) — including your national consumer authority and courts.

For merchants, legal entities under public law and parties without a general place of jurisdiction in Germany, the place of jurisdiction is Munich. We may also sue at your seat.

Should a clause of these terms be or become invalid, the rest stays in force. Ancillary agreements require text form. Language of the contract is English; the German texts reproduced here are provided because German law prescribes their wording, and in case of contradiction the German wording of those quoted passages prevails.

Contact for anything in this document, including notice of termination and withdrawal: Roman Moor, Milbertshofener Straße 54, 80807 München, Germany, contact@galleyink.com. The imprint is here, the privacy notice here.