In order to use TAD Designer/Lite, it is mandatory to properly register it. That is explained in the here Registration is free. We plan to keep it that way.

One main reason for a mandatory sign up is of course; to become a rock solid team together
By putting all of us together into a community chat system, every TAD user immediately gets connected to every other TAD users. Earlier the community system was on a Mattermost chat system hosted on our server. But that became too large – so now we have moved over to the Discord teamTAD community; hosted by Discord (which is an unusually named community system that hosts many other communities too)

One more MAJOR reason for a mandatory sign up; is because TAD protects the user from others misusing/copying their TAD models and that needs such a registration. TAD does this protection by inserting a DRM (Digital Rights Management) signature into the binary file produced by TAD. It is obvious that the better way to do that would be to use the same registration that you used to register at the community.

Note that the ASCII version of the TAD model file does not have this protection. Also, if a particular TAD model's binary file is to be shared with others WITHOUT giving the ascii version of the file; there is a way to do it by creating a Project ID but let me not digress for now.

This article explains why this is needed both for you as well as for us.

TAD Designer Lite and future versions such as the fully loaded TAD Designer, are and will remain free of charge for you to use. We are committed to creating an alternative to current BIM software. We believe our software is the only one to emerge out of architectural research. This is not an extension of mechanical engineering software hurriedly dovetailed for architecture.

We want to support TAD users as quickly as possible. We also want only serious users who have some inclination to use this software to be downloading and using it. We are then sure the entire community would make this commercially viable too.

There are many free software which gets downloaded but never really gets used at all. It gives a wrong feedback to the developers when all the developer has is the statistics of the downloads.

This kind commitment drags on our purse. We have to make this commercially viable. At the same time, we don't want to tax our users. So we thought that it is best that we all chat together, and hopefully we'll discover a way to finance this.

Details

• You need ONLY one registration to use TAD.
• You are really very close to the main developer (Sabu Francis) as well as others involved in TAD – therefore support is literally a few keystrokes away.
• Instead of having a conventional help desk, we decided to go for a community chat so that everyone helps each other. In conventional help systems, individuals are catered to privately. The entire community cannot benefit from such private discussions.
• The chat system used to work on the excellent open source Mattermost software – It works even as a discussion board. So all users will be able to read all the messages there. Including those that were posted before a person joined. But sadly, the community got quite large and our server was unable to handle the load. So we have now moved over to the free Discord system. We have the teamTAD community there now
• The dependence on emails become very low. You won't get spammed. We will only send an occasional newsletter via emails. Since we moved over to the Discord TeamTAD community system; even email address is NOT mandatory (but we strongly recommend givin. It is requested from you during installation)
• TAD also has separate dashboard for collecting issues, bugs, suggestions at http://tiny.cc/taddash You can even put up RFQ for your projects and even job listings at your office .

Thank you for your attention and support. Please also read this appeal

Sabu Francis and others involved in TAD