The FAQ says “The shop will also allow you to enter proof of tax-exempt status if your organization is tax-exempt from sales tax.” – but there is not in fact in the Fastspring checkout anyplace to do that.
Hello Daniel,
just replied to you via e-mail, but repeating here for others:
You’re right, I just tried for Massachusetts. Seems the situation is a bit more complicated in parts of the USA, as there isn’t a way to enter a tax exemption id like in many other countries, and the state of Massachusetts in general wants GST, as opposed to, e.g., a billing address in California.
For this case, see our FAQ’s with a link to FastSpring support, which can aid you in providing the necessary tax exemption forms and then create an order which is tax exempt, or also help for people who bought already and realize they want tax exemption after the fact:
In general, those FAQ’s answer a few more common questions. Unfortunately updating the official business website is a mind-blowing slow buerocratic process, so now we have those FAQ’s on our Wiki, and a link from the business website to the FAQ’s. “The Office” is alive in the real world, unfortunately…
Best,
-mario
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I opened a ticket with Fastspring. They closed the ticket a few days later without ever replying. Now what?
I don’t know. Did you check your spam folder if something has arrived there? To my knowledge, there isn’t any way I can create a tax exempt order without a tax/GST/VAT Id number for tax exemption. If your institution has such a thing, then you can do it yourself in the regular ordering/quote process, iow. you can do what I can do wrt. tax exemption.
Otherwise, if no such tax exempt registration number exists, but only other US specific documents to prove tax exempt status, then the only way is through FastSprings support system, uploading the needed certificates etc. I’m not sure how I could help, unfortunately. Legally you are FastSprings customer, for everything related to the purchase/payment/taxation process. We are only involved in defining the products that FastSpring resells on our behalf, and in providing you with our service - a license key etc. - after the purchase process is fully completed.
I guess I would retry, assuming nothing got lost in your spam folder. Maybe somebody there just dropped the ball.
Can a license be moved from one PC to another after we buy it, such that only the new PC is licensed? Thanks, Matt
Yes, you can deactivate a licensed machine, then reactivate another one, to move a license. The help PsychLicenseHandling subfunctions ‘Deactivate’ and ‘Activate’ can do that. The customer account you get under your purchase email address also allows to see which machines are activated, and to deactivate machines from the web interface.
Thanks - can we also activate a machine from the web interface (or only deactivate) ?
You can only deactivate.
First - thanks for the many years of use of Psychtoolbox!
I have a few interrelated questions regarding the use of Psychtoolbox under the new licensing model.
- In the immediate term: Does Psychtoolbox 3.0.22.1 require a paid license under Linux at this time? Details: My lab develops on Windows machines but runs experiments on Linux machines. I am in the midst of setting up two recently-inherited (so, new to me) computers to run Psychtoolbox under Linux. I’m also treating these new installs as a test run for modernizing our existing participant computers to use more recently-updated Ubuntu, Matlab, and Psychtoolbox, as we run them offline and they are way out of date. I installed Matlab 2025a and (after discovering that NeuroDebian is still on 3.0.19) downloaded the .zip of 3.0.22.1. Running SetupPsychtoolbox worked fine, but in the end, it prompted me for a license code (or to start a 14-day free trial). This seems counter to my reading of the website and forum, but perhaps I am missing something?
- Also in the immediate term, but maybe a better question for another post: Is it expected that NeuroDebian will resume updates to Psychtoolbox for Matlab, or has that permanently ended with the new licensing model?
- In the longer term: If the answer to #1 above is that Psychtoolbox does not require a license under Linux at this time, is there any updated prediction as to when/if that might change? Details: A group of Psychtoolbox users at my university is trying to determine how many licenses we collectively need (with the hope that a sufficient volume could let us persuade administrators to allocate a more centralized/stable source of license purchasing funds than individual labs/users, as the university now does for, e.g., Matlab itself). It would be very helpful to know this!
Again, thank you!
Ben
Wrt. 1 - Yes, Matlab + Linux PTB 3.0.22 and later already require a license. The psychtoolbox.net website is out of date, whereas the description in the actual online shop captures the new situation. Unfortunately, I can’t update our psychtoolbox.net website myself, and updates by those who can are ridiculously slow for various absurd reasons. That’s also why the FAQ’s about licenses are not hosted on the website you’d expect them to be, but just linked from it to a website I can actually update myself - so I can update those faster, and work around the insanity of this kafkaesque process.
Wrt. 2 - It is expected to resume updates, NeuroDebian and I agreed on that. There’s always been a variable delay between PTB updates and NeuroDebian PTB updates, depending on Yaroslav’s workload, or the complexity of the update, as NeuroDebian is also completely volunteer driven afaik., so a spare-time enterprise. The delay always varied between hours, days, weeks and sometimes months. Right now ND is at 3.0.19.14 although the last fully free PTB on Linux was 3.0.21 - just random delays. It may take a bit longer this time due to the new license model, but also simply due to Yaroslav’s plate being full, him travelling to conferences and having a summer vacation, and my side being busy as well. But eventually the NeuroDebian updates are expected to resume.
Wrt. 3 - See 1.
Thank you for the very informative answer!
We’re having some trouble using our PBT license on a single machine with multiple users. In the past we have always had one version of MatLab/PTB installed on a lab computer with a shared lab windows account but during the move to Windows 11, the university has done away with the lab’s single windows account and is requiring anyone using university equipment to log in with their unique university account. As a work-around our IT department set up a local folder on our lab machine that has read-write access limited only to lab members, so I’ve used that folder as our directory for PTB. But, every time we switch users we have to change the license to that user, delete and add in all of the necessary paths for PTB, and run the SetupPsychtoolbox function. Is there something we may have messed up with our initial installation of PTB or MatLab or is there anything we can do to make sure that the license extends to the single machine and is not specific to the user?
OS: Windows 11 Enterprise
PTB: v3.0.21
MatLab: 2025b
On Windows and macOS, the actual license keys etc. are stored globally in a operating system specific location and apply to the whole machine, not to a specific user. At least that is how it is supposed to work, according to the docs of our license management provider Cryptlex.
Therefore setting up everything anew each time shouldn’t be neccessary. But what you would have to do by default is run the PsychLicenseHandling(‘Setup’) function once per user account (or SetupPsychtoolbox, which implies that), and the user would have to consent to license management. This because the consent info file is stored in a per-user folder (the path printed by PsychtoolboxConfigDir).
A more simple solution is to call PsychLicenseHandling('SetupGlobal'); once, as this will ask for consent once, and then store the consent file inside Psychtoolbox main folder, ie. the PsychtoolboxRoot() directory. As the software is still in one common folder for all users, the file stored there should work.
In the end it is just a text file called ‘LMOpsAllowed.txt’ stored in that folder. One can also just copy that file from PsychtoolboxConfigDir() to PsychtoolboxRoot(). This might be the most easy solution on an already activated machine, sparing one from reentering the license key.
help PsychLicenseHandling gives more info. Note that more recent versions of Psychtoolbox also contain more recent versions of the license manager, which may have robustness improvements etc. Right now PTB 3.0.22.2 is the most recent version.
Hi, Would it be possible to have a buffer period between the automatic initiation of renewal payment and the expiration of the on-going licence? Our automatic renewal failed, and the licence immediately deactivated. Our university has a laborious process to validate payments and it took one day to renew the licence, causing multiple cancellations of fMRI sessions. This comes at a high cost for us (£700 per scanning hour). Allowing a week of overlap would greatly help.
Hi, sorry to hear that!
Since today, I’ve added a grace period of 14 days for all existing and future purchased licenses, so that the license will work up to 14 days past the payment due date, to account for things like failed payment processes, expired credit cards etc.
As a reminder: Our licensing service provider Cryptlex does send a warning email to the registered email address 14 days before license expiry, iow. before the software shuts down. In addition, our reseller (and contractually your actual vendor) FastSpring sends a payment reminder email multiple weeks ahead of time, iirc. over 1 month before, for the multi-seat licenses (a bit less ahead for single seat licenses), to account for slow administration processes. Additionally the software itself prints some info about days left at each first startup in a session, and a more urgent warning when the deadline comes close.
It is important though to specify a email address during purchase which is “permanent enough” so that somebody with decision power will actually be able to read it a year later, so all these reminders don’t disappear in a dead email account.
In general, using electronic payment is also a big advantage, so auto-renewals are possible at the optimal date (unless the used method, e.g., credit card, expired), or use the customer portal to update things in time. It is also possible from the portal to trigger a renewal a while in advance, e.g., self-generate pro-forma invoices, trigger manual payment etc. Electronic payment also helps for quick handling of refunds, or makes up/downgrading of number of licenses possible.
Related to that: FastSpring unfortunately also recently introduced a minimum threshold of around ~750 Euros (or maybe $750 ?) for manual wire transfer / bank transfer payments: They don’t offer these methods anymore for smaller purchases. Luckily, most of our users do buy electronically. The holdouts seem to be mostly a few German institutions, unsurprising for me as a German citizen, having grown up in the world-leading country of crushing bureaucracy, regulations, and paper carrying carrier pigeons as premium means of communication. 
-mario