02 Sep 2026 · The CivitasOPS team

A licence that works with no signal

A field crew does not have a signal. Ask anyone who has stood at a section corner with a phone held above their head.

So a licensing scheme that phones home every few days is a scheme that locks the software on the day it is needed most — in a truck, at the far end of a county road, with a client waiting. We decided early that the licence should be the least of anyone's worries, and it shapes more of the product than you would think.

What actually needs a connection

Setting a machine up. That is the short version.

A laptop is activated once, when the software is installed, and that is the moment it needs to reach us. After that, opening projects, reading, computing, exporting and printing all work with no connection at all, for as long as your firm's licence runs.

Two things stay sociable, and both are obvious once you say them out loud: a new colleague signing in on a machine for the first time, and writing into a project the firm is sharing between people. Neither is why you bought the software, and neither stops a crew already in the field from working.

No mystery countdown

There is no "check in every so often or else". A laptop that is activated and then never sees a network again keeps working until the licence itself expires. Nothing about how long it has been offline changes that, and nobody has to remember to bring a machine back to the office to keep it alive.

We think that is simply the correct behaviour for software sold to people whose job is to go where the roads stop, and we would rather not be clever about it.

For whoever runs IT

Seats are held by the firm, not by us and not by an individual. Your administrator has a portal that shows which seats are in use, and can move one to a replacement laptop when a machine is dropped, retired or stolen. That used to be a support ticket and a wait. Now it is a button, at four o'clock on a Friday, without talking to us.