Bare Compare
Bare Compare
Last updated 19 August 2026. Effective from the date of publication.
In short: you buy a version of Bare Compare and it is yours to keep and use forever, on as many of your own computers as you like, with no activation and no online check that can take it away from you. Newer major versions are a separate purchase, except that any major version released within six months of your purchase is included free.
The licence is for one person. Sharing your key publicly is the one thing that will get it revoked. The application sends a small daily ping so that we can notice when that has happened — this is a condition of the licence, and the Privacy Policy lists every field it contains.
This summary is here to be read. If it ever conflicts with the clauses below, treat the conflict as our mistake and tell us.
This agreement is between you and Fruit Salad Tech Pty Ltd, ABN
50 629 936 661, of 303–307 Castlereagh Street, Haymarket NSW 2000,
Australia (“we”, “us”). It governs your use of the Bare Compare
software, including the barec command-line tool distributed with it.
It is not the contract under which you bought the software. Bare Compare is sold through Stripe, which acts as the seller of record: your purchase contract, your receipt and your payment rights are with Stripe. This agreement governs what you may do with the software once you have it. See the Refund Policy for how refunds work.
Installing or using the software means you accept this agreement. If you do not accept it, do not install it.
Bare Compare may be used free of charge for 30 days from first run. The trial is the complete application — nothing is disabled, watermarked, or held back.
When the 30 days elapse, the application will remind you that the trial has ended and invite you to buy a licence. It will not stop working, lock your data away, or refuse to open your files. We would rather ask than hold your work hostage. This is a deliberate choice and not an oversight, but it is not permission to use the software indefinitely without paying for it: past 30 days you need a licence.
The trial clock is kept on your own computer. We are aware that this means it can be reset, and we have chosen not to fight that with hidden files or registry breadcrumbs, because every such measure fails against anyone determined and inconveniences honest people who change machines.
When you buy a licence we grant you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to install and use Bare Compare, subject to this agreement.
The licence is for one person, and that person may use it on as many computers as they personally use. Your laptop, your desktop, your machine at work and a virtual machine on any of them are all covered by one licence. There is no device limit, no seat count, and no activation step — the software never asks permission to run.
What the licence does not cover is other people. A second person needs a second licence, whether they sit beside you or on another continent, and a licence key is not to be given to colleagues, published, or included in a shared configuration, disk image, container image or dotfiles repository.
We have not built a technical barrier to any of this, on purpose. We would rather trust you and be occasionally wrong than make the software worse for everyone who is honest.
Your licence key is checked entirely offline, against information built into the application itself. Bare Compare does not contact us to decide whether it may run, and it will keep working on a machine that has never been connected to a network. If we vanish tomorrow, your copy keeps working.
It is a condition of this licence that you do not disable or block the licence ping. Once a day at most, when the application starts, it sends a short message to our server containing an installation identifier, your licence key's identifier, the version, operating system, processor architecture and system language. Nothing else.
Its only purpose is to detect licence keys that have been shared publicly, which is the single thing that the arrangement in section 3.2 — no activation, no device limit, offline validation — cannot otherwise survive. The complete field list, what we do with it, and how long we keep it are in the Privacy Policy, which forms part of this agreement.
The ping carries nothing about the files you compare or how you use the software, and it never will: any product-usage data would be a separate opt-in feature, not an addition to this one.
Reverse engineering: you may not decompile or disassemble the software, except to the extent that doing so is permitted by law regardless of contract — which in Australia includes the interoperability and error-correction provisions of the Copyright Act 1968, and in the EU the corresponding provisions of the Software Directive. Nothing in this agreement purports to take away a right the law gives you.
If we find a licence key published or shared at a scale that is plainly not one person's own use, we may revoke that key. A revoked key stops being accepted by future releases of the software; copies you have already installed continue to run.
Revocation is a manual decision made by a person, not an automatic one, and it is deliberately rare. If your key is revoked and you believe it was leaked rather than shared by you, contact us — that is a common and entirely sympathetic situation, and the application's own message directs you to a human for exactly that reason.
Bare Compare is licensed, not sold, and we retain all intellectual property rights in it. This agreement grants you the rights set out in section 3 and no others.
The software includes third-party open-source components, each under its own licence. Those licences govern those components and, where they grant you rights broader than this agreement does, those rights are unaffected. The list of components and their licences is available in the application's About window.
Nothing in this agreement excludes, restricts or modifies any guarantee, right or remedy you have under the Australian Consumer Law or any other law that cannot lawfully be excluded. If you are a consumer under that law, our goods and services come with guarantees that cannot be excluded, and you may be entitled to a replacement or refund for a major failure and to compensation for any other reasonably foreseeable loss or damage.
Where the law permits us to limit our liability, we limit it to re-supplying the software or paying the cost of having it re-supplied.
Subject to section 8, and to the fullest extent permitted by law: the software is provided “as is”, without warranty of any kind, and we do not warrant that it will be free of defects or that its results will meet your requirements.
Subject to section 8, and to the fullest extent permitted by law, our total liability arising out of or in connection with this agreement is limited to the amount you paid for the licence, and we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, loss of profits, or loss of data.
A practical word about that last one, since this is a tool that shows you differences between files. Bare Compare can modify and delete files when you tell it to. Please keep backups, and satisfy yourself that a comparison says what you think it says before acting on it. No software of this kind should be the only thing standing between you and losing work.
This agreement applies for as long as you use the software. It ends if you materially breach it — in particular by sharing your key publicly — and on termination you must stop using the software and destroy your copies. Sections 7 to 9 survive termination.
This agreement is governed by the laws of New South Wales, Australia, and the courts of New South Wales have non-exclusive jurisdiction. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory laws of your own country.
This agreement may be published in translation for convenience. The English version is the one that governs, and prevails in the event of any discrepancy.
We may change this agreement for future releases and future purchases. Changes do not retroactively alter the terms of a licence you have already bought — the agreement that applies to your licence is the one published when you bought it, and we keep those versions available on request.
support@barecompare.app, or Fruit Salad Tech Pty Ltd, 303–307 Castlereagh Street, Haymarket NSW 2000, Australia.