Installing the beta

The Warpstead beta is free for Windows 10 and 11 until version 1.0. It’s in the Microsoft Store: Microsoft checks it and signs it before it’s published, so it installs like any other Store app.

What you get for trying it now

• Warpstead free until version 1.0, with no account and no credit card.
• A free license if you’re among the first 100. Register your PC from the app (it asks you a couple of minutes after you first start it, or use Keep the founder price in Settings) and confirm your email. The first 100 get their 1.0 license free.
• After the first 100, the beta is still free for everyone, and whoever registers before 1.0 gets the license at €49 instead of €79.
• A free license if your report gets something fixed. Use Report a problem in the app, or reply to your beta email. If what you found leads to a fix, the license is yours, and your name goes in the release notes if you want it there.
• The same for ideas: if something you suggest ends up in Warpstead, you get the license and the credit.

Warpstead is made by a graphic designer who uses it every day for client work. It’s free now because it works, and it gets better the more people use it and say what’s wrong. Serious suggestions are welcome.

Why it won’t stay free

While Warpstead is in beta, the people using it are helping to test it, so it costs nothing. Once it’s mature, keeping it right is steady work: fixing what breaks, keeping up with new versions of Windows, adding what people ask for. The license pays for that work. You pay once, with no subscription and no ads.

What you need

• A 64-bit PC with Windows 11, or Windows 10 version 2004 or later.
• The Microsoft Store app, which comes with Windows.

Install it

1. Open Warpstead’s page in the Microsoft Store, or search for Warpstead in the Store app.
2. Click Get or Install.
3. Start Warpstead from the Start menu.

What “beta” means here

• Expect rough edges. Warpstead has run on a handful of PCs so far, and yours will find things ours didn’t.
• Your files stay yours. Warpstead only moves, renames or edits files when you ask it to. As with any beta, keep a backup of work you can’t afford to lose.
• Tell us what goes wrong. Reply to your beta email, or write to hello@warpstead.com. One person reads every message, so an answer can take a day or two.

Until version 1.0

Each beta version has an end date, and the Store replaces it on its own with the next one, which moves the date forward. If a version is about to run out, the app reminds you two weeks before. When version 1.0 comes out, the beta ends: it shows a closing screen with a button that opens your workspaces folder, and your workspaces and files stay on your disk, untouched.

To check the date, the beta asks a few well-known public websites for the current time. Nothing about you or your files is sent.

Free for the first 100, €49 for everyone who registers

Version 1.0, the full release, will be a one-time license at €79, VAT included in the EU. During the beta the app asks you to register your PC and leave your email, and that’s how we recognise you. The first 100 people who register get their license free, and so do the testers who help us most with their reports. Everyone else who registers before 1.0, from the app or with their email on this site, gets the founder license at €49. Outside Europe the prices are in US dollars: $55 for the founder license, $89 from version 1.0, and renewals at $21 and $33.

• Warpstead is yours to keep, on two PCs.
• You get every update for 12 months from your purchase. After that, Warpstead keeps working with everything you had, and bug fixes keep coming. New features come with a renewal: €19 a year for founders instead of €29, a price that never goes up.
• No account. You activate Warpstead with a key, it checks the license when you’re online, and it works for up to 30 days without a connection.
• If it isn’t for you, write within 14 days and you get your money back, no questions asked.

Removing it

Open Settings, then Apps, then Installed apps, and uninstall Warpstead. Like every Store app, it takes its own data with it, and that includes your workspaces. Your files and folders on the canvas aren’t touched.

To keep your workspaces, copy them before you uninstall. In File Explorer, go to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages, open the folder whose name contains Warpstead, then LocalCache\Roaming\com.warpstead.