Help · Licensing

How licensing and seats work

What a seat is, how your firm shares them, and what happens when a machine goes offline, crashes, or changes hands.

The pieces, in one minute

Your firm buys a license with a number of seats — say, ten. A seat is the right for one computer to run DSP inside AutoCAD Plant 3D right now. Three things work together to make that happen:

The Nutechna Companion — the small desktop app you sign into. It talks to the Nutechna license service, takes a seat for your machine, and keeps it fresh in the background while you work.
A signed license file — when your machine takes a seat, our service issues it a cryptographically signed file, made out to your specific computer. Think of it as a ticket with your machine's name on it: copying it to another computer does nothing, and editing it voids the signature.
The DSP plugin — inside Plant 3D, the plugin reads that file and nothing else. It never uses your network connection; drafting keeps working on a job site with no internet, for as long as the ticket stays fresh (more on that below).

Seats are shared, like library books

A seat is not welded to one computer forever. When you choose Check out a seat in the Companion, your machine checks a seat out (signing in alone never uses one). While you work, the Companion quietly renews it every few minutes. When you're done — or when your machine goes quiet for long enough — the seat returns to the pool so a colleague can use it.

That means a firm with ten seats and a hundred engineers is perfectly normal: any ten machines can be working at the same moment, and the seats flow to whoever is working today.

Before taking a seat, you can always see the state of play: the seat board in your firm's client portal shows every seat, who holds it, and how recently it checked in. If all seats are taken, you'll see exactly who to ask.

Checking in and checking out

Check-out is one click: on the Companion's ACCOUNT page, choose Check out a seat on any machine at your firm and it takes a free seat; DSP also asks for one when you start drafting.
Check-in is deliberate: when you're finished for the day (or moving to another machine), check your seat in and it's immediately available to your colleagues. Your firm's administrator can also release any seat from the Companion's Firm Admin page.
Forgot to check in? Nothing is lost. A machine that stops renewing its ticket has its seat returned automatically about two hours later — no administrator needed.

Working offline

A checked-out seat holds a ticket that the Companion renews every few minutes while it can reach us, and a ticket stays good for an hour after its last renewal. If the connection drops, drafting carries on until that hour is up; then the plugin pauses its drafting commands and says why — it could not reach the license server. Nothing is lost and nothing expires: the moment the Companion can reach us again the ticket is renewed and the commands resume. Keep the Companion running and signed in while you draft, and it takes care of this without you noticing.

The trade-off is honest and worth knowing: the short ticket is what lets an abandoned seat return to your colleagues within about two hours instead of days, and it is why a license file cannot be copied to a second machine and used there. A machine that must never lose its seat — a field laptop, a plotting station — is pinned instead.

Pinned seats — when a machine must never lose its place

Some machines shouldn't share: a dedicated plotting station, or a field laptop that sits in a truck for six weeks between sites. A seat can be pinned to such a machine. A pinned seat never returns to the pool automatically, no matter how long it sits idle — it behaves like a permanently reserved seat. Pinning is set for your firm on request: your administrator writes to support@nutechna.com with the machine's name as the seat board shows it.

Why a seat is tied to a specific machine while it's checked out

While your machine holds a seat, its ticket is bound to a fingerprint of that machine's hardware. That's what makes the system fair for everyone: a license file can't be copied around a firm — or out of it — to run more copies than were paid for. Moving yourself to a new machine is never a problem: check in on the old one, sign in on the new one.

Questions we hear

My computer says the license needs attention. What do I actually do?: Open the Companion and sign in — that solves nearly everything, because it fetches a fresh ticket. If it doesn't, the message includes a short support code; send it to support@nutechna.com and it tells us precisely what to fix.
My machine crashed while holding a seat. Is the seat stuck?: No. Restart and sign in and you'll usually get the same seat straight back. If the machine never comes back, the seat frees itself about two hours after its last renewal, or an administrator can release it immediately from the Companion's Firm Admin page.
I installed new hardware (or Docker, or a VPN). Will I lose my seat?: Usually not: a routine change leaves your machine recognized as the same machine, and its seat carries over. If it is not recognized — a replaced motherboard, say — sign in and check a seat out again; the old seat returns to the pool by itself about two hours later.
Does the plugin send anything to the internet while I draft?: No. The plugin only ever reads the local license file. The Companion is the only part that talks to Nutechna, and only about licensing and updates.
We're hiring — do we need more seats?: Only if more people need to draft at the same time. Seats count machines drafting at the same time, not employees. Your administrator can see usage on the seat board and ask us to adjust the count whenever the firm's rhythm changes.