Last updated: 11 August 2026
I’m Pär, and I’ve been making Simple History since 2010. My one-person company in Sweden, Eskapism aktiebolag, sells the paid add-ons.
I wrote this page because people buying for a company or a public authority keep needing to know exactly what a license covers before anyone will sign off on it. If you’re buying it for your own site, the short version is all you need.
The short version
- One license covers one live production website, plus every non-production copy of it.
- On a WordPress multisite network, every subsite that runs the plugin counts as a site.
- The software is GPL. There’s no EULA to sign.
- Where you host it, and who runs the servers, makes no difference.
- When a license expires nothing stops working. You just stop getting updates and support.
What counts as a “site”
I count licenses by live production websites. Not servers, not environments.
So one production site, plus every copy of it you need along the way (your laptop, a staging server, QA, pre-production), is one license. A second separate production site is a second license, or one of the bigger tiers. Those get cheaper per site the further up you go.
WordPress multisite networks
On a multisite network, every subsite running the plugin counts as a site. Ten subsites using Premium means the 10-site tier.
I know that isn’t the answer network owners hope for, so here’s my reasoning. Each subsite keeps its own log, in its own database tables, with its own settings. Nothing is shared between them. As far as the plugin is concerned a network is just a lot of separate installations living in one WordPress, and it’s the same amount of work for me to support. The bigger tiers exist for this: at 50 sites you’re paying around $10 per site instead of $79.
Subsites that don’t run the plugin don’t count. It’s where it’s actually installed that matters, not how big the network is.
Each add-on is licensed separately, with its own key and its own site count. Where the key goes on a network, and what to do if you run an add-on on a subsite only, is covered on multisite, staging and development sites.
Running something big or unusual? Email me before you buy and we’ll figure something out.
Where you can run it
Anywhere. Shared hosting, your own hardware, AWS, Azure, a client’s servers, a government cloud that someone else administers entirely. None of it needs my permission and none of it changes anything about the license. Nothing is tied to an IP address, a hostname or a particular hosting company.
The license is the GPL
Simple History and the paid add-ons are released under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later. That’s the license. There’s nothing else to sign and no EULA hiding anywhere.
Which means you’re not really buying permission to run the software. The GPL already gives you that, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. What you’re paying for is everything around it: updates that arrive on their own, the new features I release while your license is active, and me answering your email when something breaks.
So the site count is how I price the thing, not a lock. There’s nothing in the code enforcing it, and that’s deliberate. I’d rather spend my time building the plugin than building copy protection, and I’d rather trust people than treat them as suspects. It works because customers are straight with me about what they run. That’s also what pays for the next release.
Activations
Activate the key on your production site. A single-site license gets one activation, the 5-site tier gets five, and so on.
Your development, staging and test copies don’t need activating. They run with everything switched on. They just won’t update themselves, so grab the current version from your order page at Lemon Squeezy, my payment provider, when you need it.
Activations are recorded on my side rather than in your database, which has one irritating consequence. Rebuild a site from scratch and the old activation is still sitting there, so the new one gets refused. You can free it up yourself from the same order page, or email support@simple-history.com and I’ll clear it — usually the same day, though I’m one person in a European timezone.
If you clone databases between environments there is one warning worth reading first, because the clone brings production’s activation record along with it. That, and how licenses work on a multisite network, is covered on multisite, staging and development sites.
When a license expires
Nothing stops working. The plugin carries on exactly as before, with every feature, on whatever version you have installed. You stop getting new versions and support until you renew, and that’s the whole of it.
There’s no kill switch and no crippled mode, and nothing phones my server to decide whether you’re still allowed to log things. If simple-history.com disappeared tomorrow your site would carry on as though nothing had happened. Worth knowing if you’re putting this somewhere it needs to sit quietly for years.
Support
Email support@simple-history.com. I read it and I answer it, usually within a day, in English or Swedish.
What I can’t give you is a contractual SLA, or ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certificates. There’s no team here to run any of that. If your organisation needs a supplier questionnaire filled in, send it over and I’ll do my best with it. My privacy policy already answers most of what those ask about: EU jurisdiction, the US CLOUD Act, and whether you need a data processing agreement from me (you almost certainly don’t, and it explains why).
Payment, invoices and refunds
Lemon Squeezy handles all the money as merchant of record. They take the payment, deal with VAT, and issue the invoice, so the terms covering the purchase itself are theirs and your card details never reach me. Put your company name, address and EU VAT number in at checkout and you’ll get a proper VAT invoice for your accounts department.
Buying for a client? Get the legal entity and VAT number right at checkout. The invoice is built from whatever is entered there, and changing it afterwards means going through Lemon Squeezy’s support rather than mine.
Refunds: 30 days, no reason needed.
Questions
If your legal or procurement people need something confirmed in writing, email contact@simple-history.com. I’d much rather answer the actual question than have you try to work it out from a page like this one.