License Unification & Your 3 Devices
How license unification works — one key, two products. Plus the 3-device system and how to manage your slots.
A Celestial Vault license is two things at once: it unlocks the vault itself and it unlocks Time Garden Eternal's AI features. Same key. Both products.
This page is everything you need to know about your license — finding it, using it, managing devices, recovering it.
Bought before July 2026? Your license is on Lemon Squeezy.
This page points to the Polar customer portal, where licenses bought from July 2026 onward live. If you purchased earlier, find your key and manage your device slots in the Lemon Squeezy orders page instead. Anywhere below that says "Polar customer portal," use that page.
One Key, Both Products
The Celestial welcome flow asks for your license once. When validation succeeds, it writes the key to two places:
- The celestial-plugin's settings (unlocking the vault UX, settings, atmosphere, etc.)
- The time-garden-plugin's settings (unlocking the AI summaries, ratings, Q&A, Wheel of Life, Year-in-Review)
You don't see two separate license entry forms. You don't manage two separate keys. The unification happens silently at the source.
If you previously bought Time Garden Eternal.
If you'd already purchased Time Garden Eternal — at the same email — and your license is still valid, the Celestial welcome flow detects this and skips the license step entirely. Your existing key has been promoted to also unlock Celestial.
Where To Find Your License Key
After purchasing the Celestial Vault, your order confirmation email from Polar links to your customer portal, where you can view and copy your license key.
If you've lost the email — easy recovery:
- Go to the Polar customer portal
- Enter the email address you used to purchase; Polar sends you a one-time code to sign in
- Click your Celestial Vault order
- View and copy your license key there
The same portal covers any other purchase you've made from the Time Garden store, your TG Eternal purchase (if separate) included.
Purchased before July 2026? Your license lives in the Lemon Squeezy orders page instead, for both key recovery and device management.
Your 3 Device Slots
A Celestial Vault license activates on up to 3 devices.
A "device" in this context is essentially a vault location on a particular machine. Activating Celestial on:
- Your work Mac → 1 slot used
- Your home Mac → 1 slot used
- Your iPad → 1 slot used
That uses all three.
Same machine, multiple vaults?
If you have two separate Celestial Vault folders on the same computer (e.g., one in ~/Documents/ and a backup copy in ~/Dropbox/), each one consumes a slot when activated. Try not to do this — and if you do, deactivate the spare.
Managing Device Slots
When you've used all 3 slots and want to activate a new device:
- Visit the Polar customer portal
- Sign in with your purchase email (one-time code)
- Find your Celestial Vault order
- Open the license key's device list
- Remove an old device to free a slot
- Activate the new device with the same license key
Your old device's vault stays on disk and remains readable — but it loses access to the AI features and the welcome-gated vault experience until reactivated.
What Happens When A License Expires Or Is Revoked
Graceful degradation.
If your license becomes invalid (e.g., refund issued, manual revocation), the Celestial Vault doesn't lock you out of your data. The vault content remains fully readable. What you lose:
- AI features (the AI buttons stop working)
- The vault's premium UX layer (welcome experience, certain settings, etc.)
Your daily notes, your category pages, your imported notes — all still openable, all still searchable, all still yours.
This is the Celestial promise: your content is permanent, your premium layer is gated.
How License Validation Actually Works
The plugins check your license against a small server at lemonsqueezy-api-server.vercel.app/api/license. Validation:
- Happens once during welcome (writes a
license_cache: { isValid: true, validUntil: <date> }object) - Re-validates every ~24 hours in the background
- Falls back to the cached state if the server is unreachable temporarily
This means: if your internet is down, the vault still works. If the server is briefly offline, the vault still works. Only sustained validation failures (multiple days) eventually flip your license to invalid state.
No data leaves your machine.
License validation only sends your license key + a hashed instance ID. Your journal content, your category notes, your AI prompts — none of it touches the network. The validation ping is encrypted and tiny.
Vault Birth Path Detection
Each Celestial Vault tracks a vault birth context — the original disk location where the vault was first opened. This prevents trivial duplication (e.g., copying the entire vault folder to a friend and having them activate with your license).
What this means in practice:
- ✅ Moving your vault to a new folder on the same machine → fine
- ✅ Renaming the vault folder → fine
- ✅ Backing up the vault to a different drive → fine, the backup just needs reactivation if you start working in it
- ❌ Sharing the vault folder with a friend who activates with their own license → fine for them, but your slot is unaffected
- ❌ Sharing your license key with a friend → it'll work for them but eats one of your 3 device slots
If you ever see a "vault appears to have been duplicated" warning, email support@timegarden.app. Usually it's a false positive from a sync tool, easily resolved.
How To Reset License Data Manually
If your license cache gets stuck (rare, usually only during testing or unusual sync scenarios):
- Open Obsidian's Command Palette (
Cmd/Ctrl + P) - Run "Time Garden: Reset License Data"
- Re-enter your license key
This clears the cached validation state and forces a fresh check.
The Time Garden Eternal Side Of The Same Coin
If your Celestial Vault license is valid, the Time Garden Eternal AI features automatically work. You don't need to "also activate Eternal" — it's already done.
If you want to use Time Garden Eternal in a different Obsidian vault (e.g., your personal vault that's not the Celestial Vault), you can install the standalone Time Garden vault there and enter the same license key in its plugin settings. The same key is valid in both places (and counts as one of your device slots).
Up Next
- The Bundled Ollama Models — what your license unlocks via local AI
- License Issues — troubleshooting if validation fails
- How Celestial's Time Garden Differs — the structural deltas this license enables