What do I get without paying?
You want to know what you can actually do before any money is involved, and whether the answer is "nothing useful".
One free run of each mode, with no card: one teleport, one walk, one drive, one joystick session. Not a stripped-down demonstration of each — the real mode, once.
01What the grant is
Every account gets one free run of every mode GPSLarp has. Teleport, walk, drive and joystick each come with one, and each one is the mode itself rather than a cut-down version of it. No card is asked for at any point, and none is held.
A run is spent when the app asks permission for it, not when the movement begins. That ordering is deliberate: permission has to come before the thing it permits, and the count is kept on the server rather than on your Mac.
Three things follow, and together they are the whole answer to "did that attempt cost me one?".
- Everything the app can check by itself runs first. A missing iPhone, a route that cannot be built, a connection that is not up — each of those stops before permission is ever asked for, so none of them costs a run.
- Being refused costs nothing, and the app says so. When it turns down a walk or a drive because you have no free run left, it adds, in its own words: Your free run was not spent by this attempt — nothing started.
- If the phone refuses a run the app had already been given permission for, the app asks for that run back. It does this automatically and tells you nothing either way, on the reasoning that you are already looking at one failure and do not need a second one about a request you never made.
What "asks for it back" does not promise
That last one is best-effort and it is worth reading as best-effort. The app makes the request; if the request cannot be delivered — no connection, a server that does not answer — the run stays spent and nothing on screen mentions it. There is also a limit on how many times a run can be handed back, so it is a safety net for a phone that would not cooperate rather than a way to retry indefinitely.
02Downloading and running are different questions
These two get merged constantly and the difference is the whole shape of the product, so they are stated apart:
- Downloading asks for nothing. No account, no email address, no card. The installer is a file and it does not interview you.
- Running the app asks you to sign in. The window opens on a sign-in screen, because the free runs are counted against an account rather than against a machine.
So "free" here does not mean anonymous. It means no payment. If signing in is the part that is stopping you, that has its own page: I can't sign in to GPSLarp.
03What the app tells you as they go
The app says where you stand rather than making you count, and there are three messages worth recognising.
Before you have used a mode, the badge under that mode reads that one free run is left. Nothing is hidden and nothing is nagging you.
When one mode is spent and others are not, it says the free run of that mode is used up, and how many other modes are still free. That wording is deliberate: running out of walk does not touch drive.
When they are all spent, it says every free run is used, and points you at subscribing or at activating a code from the account buttons in the app itself.
The sentence worth quoting
If you start a walk or a drive with no free run left for it, the app refuses and tells you: "Your free run was not spent by this attempt — nothing started." That is there because the natural fear at that moment is that the refusal itself burned something. It did not. A run is spent by a run, never by being told no.
04The count does not come back
The grant is one per account, and none of the usual moves restores it:
- Reinstalling does not restore it.
- Deleting the app's data folder does not restore it.
- Cancelling a subscription and subscribing again does not restore it — see cancelling, which says the same thing from the other side.
It is counted against the account, so it follows the account rather than the machine or the installation.
05Where the count actually lives
On the server, against your account. The app asks before every free run and starts it only if the answer is yes. It sends nothing about what it believes it has used, so there is no file on your Mac to clear and nothing a reinstall can reset — the request is the same either way, and so is the answer.
That has one consequence people meet in practice and it is not obvious: a free run needs a working internet connection at the moment you start it. With no way to reach the server the app refuses, and it refuses with a message about being offline rather than about the grant, because somebody who cannot reach the server has not run out of anything. A paid subscription is the case that keeps working without a connection — see does GPSLarp need an internet connection?.
Corrected. This section said the opposite until recently: that the shipping app kept its own count in a file on your Mac and never asked the server. That was true when the page was written and stopped being true days later. The rule never changed — one free run of each mode, per account — but a reader who acted on the old mechanism would have concluded that clearing a folder or reinstalling did something. It does not, and it did not fully then either.
06Why a free run rather than a compatibility list
Most software in this category tells you which phones and which apps it works with. This one does not, and the free run is what stands in its place.
No iOS version is claimed here, and nothing has been tested against any particular app on your phone. That is an unusual thing for a product page to admit, and it is the honest position: the requirements that are known are on will GPSLarp work with my Mac and my iPhone?, and everything past them is something you find out on your own hardware. The free run of each mode is how you find it out without having paid first.
07When the free runs are gone
Two ways forward, and both are on your account rather than on your machine. Subscribing removes the run limits — the plans and what they cost are on the home page, because a figure typed onto a help page is a figure that goes stale without anybody noticing. An activation code does the same thing and is redeemed in the app; where the code goes covers that, including the part where the field is not where people look for it.
Neither is required to keep the app. An account with every free run spent still opens, still signs in, and can still put your real location back — stopping is deliberately outside every gate, because leaving somebody unable to undo what this app did to their phone would be indefensible.
The honest limit of this page: it tells you what the grant is and what the app counts. It does not tell you that a free run will do what you want on your iPhone, because nobody in this project has demonstrated that end to end — which is precisely why the run is free.