Access & billing

Three ways in. Two of them cost nothing.

1 · Free, right now

No account, no card, no sign-up. Nothing to request.

uv tool install --force mcpgawk && mcpgawk

That gets you scan, verify, the guard hook, decide and the panel — free forever, not a trial. Go to the Quickstart.

2 · A beta seat, for the paid capabilities

The gateway is still in beta, so you ask for a seat rather than buy one. It costs nothing while the beta runs, and your key carries an expiry date — every gated run prints it, so you always know how long you have.

Request a seat at mcp.gawk.dev/trial.html.
You get back two things, and you need both: your key, and a GitHub invite to the repository the paid capabilities install from. The key alone will not install them.
Accept the GitHub invite, then activate as in step 3 below.

The grant announces itself: mcpgawk status tells you it is a beta grant and when it expires, rather than quietly behaving like a paid licence.

3 · Paying for it

Subscribe at the pricing page, or go straight to mcp.gawk.dev/subscribe. Payment is handled by Lemon Squeezy as merchant of record, so they handle VAT and invoicing. £29 per month per person, 7-day free trial, cancel any time.
Two emails arrive. One from Lemon Squeezy with your licence key. One from us with a link to claim access to the private repository the paid capabilities ship from.
Claim the repository access. Follow the link, enter your GitHub username, and you are added as a read-only collaborator. There is no token to copy or rotate.
Activate. Either the one-liner, which installs, saves the key and runs a real smoke test:
```
curl -sSL https://mcp.gawk.dev/install.sh | bash -s -- YOUR-LICENCE-KEY
```
or by hand, once the repo invite is accepted:
```
mcpgawk login YOUR-LICENCE-KEY
mcpgawk status
```
login validates the key and writes it to ~/.gawk/config.json at mode 0600, so you do not have to export it in every shell.
Check it took. mcpgawk status names the tier. mcpgawk enforce status should no longer exit 3.

Prefer to check before touching a terminal? The activation page verifies a key is live and walks the same steps, including the Windows path.

If activation fails

What happened	What it means
A paid command exits `3`	The capability is not installed on this machine. Almost always the repository invite has not been accepted yet — that is what ships the paid code.
The install one-liner fails on the private repo	Same cause. The message should be about the GitHub invite, not about pip.
The key is rejected	Check it on the activation page first. If it is live there and rejected locally, tell us — that is a real defect.
It worked, then stopped	Your beta key has an expiry date and says so in `mcpgawk status`. A subscription that lapsed does the same.

Cancelling and refunds

Cancel any time from the Lemon Squeezy portal linked in your purchase email; access runs to the end of the period. See refunds and terms. Cancelling never disables the free tier, which is not licence-gated at all.