Frequently Asked

What counts as personal use?

The shortest answer: you, on your own time, on your own work. The longer answer is in two lists.

Good fits for the Personal license

• Learning Bridger on your own time
• A personal side project or hobby migration
• Pro-bono volunteer work for a nonprofit or charity
• Coursework, self-study, or independent research
• Open source projects you're not making money from

Not personal use

• Billable client work or consulting deliverables
• Migrations performed as part of your day job
• Anything someone is paying you (or your team) to do
• Internal projects at a company, paid nonprofit role, or agency

The line is whether money is changing hands. If it is — even indirectly through your salary — you should be on a paid tier. If it isn't, Personal is yours. We can't enforce this, and we don't try to. We're trusting you.

What if my hobby project starts making money?

Congratulations! That's a great problem to have. When you start making real money and can afford a license, come talk to us — and tell us your success story while you're at it. We'd love to hear it.

More concretely: when your project crosses from hobby to commercial, you should move to a paid tier. There's no specific revenue threshold and we're not going to audit you. Use your judgment, and err on the side of supporting the tool that helped you get there.

Can my employer get a Personal license for me?

No. Personal licenses are issued to individuals, on personal email addresses, for non-commercial use. If your employer is coordinating it, by definition it isn't personal.

What you want is the Individual or Team tier — that's exactly the use case those exist for, and they come with included support hours that Personal doesn't.

I volunteer for a nonprofit — does that count as personal use?

If you're volunteering — donating your time, not being paid — yes, that counts as personal use. We're happy to help.

If you're a paid employee at a nonprofit doing migration work as part of your job, that's not personal use, even though the nonprofit isn't profit-seeking. The line we draw is whether someone is being paid for the work, not whether the organization is for-profit. In that case you'd want an Individual or Team license.

How do I get a Personal license?

Four steps:

1. Download Bridger from the Downloads page. Without a license it runs in Trial mode — full features, but saving and exporting are disabled.
2. In Bridger, go to Help → About and click Get a License. Copy the machine identifier shown.
3. Submit a request through the request form, selecting Personal as the tier and pasting in the identifier. Use a personal email address.
4. We'll generate a license file and email it back. Copy the file to the directory you run the Bridger application from and you're in Personal mode.

One license per machine. We track issuance, so reusing email addresses or requesting from corporate-sounding domains will get a follow-up question rather than an automatic license.

What happens when my license expires?

Each Bridger build has an expiration date baked in — the first of the next quarter, give or take. When that date passes, the build reverts to Trial mode: workbooks you've created remain readable, but saving and exporting are disabled until you re-download the latest build.

The license file itself doesn't expire. Once you grab the new build, your existing license activates Personal mode again. No new email required.

Does my license file expire, or just the build?

Just the build. The license file is permanent — it's the credential that says "this machine is authorized for Personal mode." The build is what carries the expiration date. So renewal is purely re-downloading; you don't need to talk to us each quarter.

Why does the build expire at all?

Two reasons. The honest one: it's the simplest enforcement mechanism we could design that doesn't require a license server, doesn't phone home, and doesn't punish anyone who's gone offline for a while. You re-download every three months and that's it.

The less obvious one: it gives us a natural cadence to ship updates. The latest build is always the recommended one because Personal users will be on it within a quarter regardless. That's good for everyone.

What's the difference between Trial and Personal?

Trial is anyone, any purpose, no license, no expiration — just read-only. You can import schemas, build mappings, explore every feature; you just can't save your work or export anything. Use it as long as you'd like.

Personal is for non-commercial use, requires a license file we issue, unlocks save and export, and the build expires quarterly so you re-download to renew. Same software, fully unlocked.

Both are free.

Why do I have to fill out the download form every time?

Honestly? Because seeing those notifications tells us people are actually using Bridger, and that's what keeps us motivated to keep building it. The form is short, the email field is optional, and we genuinely don't follow up. Think of it as a low-cost way to say hi.

If that sounds like a tax, the more accurate framing is: Bridger Personal is free in exchange for a small amount of ongoing effort on your part — the download form, the fingerprint email, the quarterly re-download. People who don't want the effort can buy a paid license and skip it. People who do, don't pay anything. Both groups are choosing freely, which is the point.

Is there support for Personal users?

Not included support, no. Personal users have access to the documentation, the user guide, and this FAQ. Email is welcome too, but please understand that paid users get response-time commitments and Personal users don't.

If you need real support — onboarding help, someone to walk you through a workbook, response within a business day — that's what the paid tiers are for. Each one includes a block of hours specifically for that.

Why isn't support included with the free tier?

Because our time isn't free, even when the software is. Included hours and the hourly rate exist so paying users have a real commitment from us. Extending that commitment to free users would either water it down for paying users or eat all of our time. Neither is sustainable.

We've been on the other side of this — the guys who needed a tool like this and couldn't justify the budget for it. That's the whole reason the Personal tier exists. We just can't also commit our time to free users without making the model fall apart.