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 sign into the Companion, your machine checks a seat out. 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 automatic: sign into the Companion on any machine at your firm and it takes a free seat.
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 portal.
Forgot to check in? Nothing is lost. A machine that stops checking in has its seat returned automatically once its offline allowance runs out — no administrator needed.

Working offline

Every checked-out seat carries an offline allowance — a window (typically a day or two; your firm can ask us to tune it) during which the plugin keeps working with no internet at all. The Companion renews the ticket whenever it can reach us; if it can't, you simply run down the allowance. Reconnect any time and the clock resets.

The trade-off is honest and worth knowing: the same allowance that lets a field laptop draft off-grid is how long an abandoned seat takes to free itself. A firm that wants crashed machines' seats back fast chooses a short allowance; a firm with field crews chooses a long one.

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 jobs. Your firm's administrator can pin a seat to 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, and it shows a "pinned" marker on the seat board so everyone can see why it isn't available.

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 when its offline allowance runs out, or an administrator can release it immediately from the portal.
I installed new hardware (or Docker, or a VPN) and DSP asked me to sign in again.: Your machine's fingerprint shifted, and the system recognized it as the same machine and carried your seat over. If it ever doesn't, signing in once fixes it — you will never lose a seat to a hardware change.
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 concurrent users, not employees. Your administrator can see usage on the seat board and ask us to adjust the count whenever the firm's rhythm changes.