Unite: how to decide what you need

Most people arrive at this decision with a feature list open in one tab and a price page in another, and neither of them answers the question they actually have. The question is not whether Unite can turn a website into a Mac app. It can. The question is which license to buy, how long that license stays valid, and what happens on the day a paid upgrade lands. Those answers are all published. Settle them first and the feature comparison takes ten minutes.

Start with the machines, not the features

The Unite Pro product page states the requirement plainly: Apple Silicon and Intel are both supported, macOS 15 or greater is required, and the app is designed for macOS 26 Tahoe. Anything still on macOS 14 or earlier is out. The Setapp listing for the same app states macOS 14.6 or later, so the two routes are not describing identical builds, and anyone planning to run this on an older machine should confirm before paying.

This matters most in a mixed fleet. If one desk runs an older Mac that cannot move past macOS 14, the decision is no longer about which tool to buy. It is about whether that desk gets a different tool or a newer machine. Settling that before comparing features saves a round of research that would be thrown away anyway.

Interface language belongs in this same first pass. Unite Pro added Spanish, French, German, Simplified Chinese, Hebrew, and Japanese for the first time. The 6.x line stayed English only. If the person using it will be configuring link rules and user scripts rather than just opening a window, the language of the settings panes is a real cost.

The seat tiers, and where the price per machine flattens

Licenses are sold by the number of Macs. Prices are in USD and the purchase page notes that taxes may apply.

License	Machines	Price	Per machine
Unite Pro, 1 Mac	1	$39.99	$39.99
Unite Pro, 3 Macs	3	$59.99	about $20
Unite Pro, 5 Macs	5	$99.99	about $20

The per machine cost drops sharply between one and three seats, then stays flat. Two single licenses cost $79.98, which is more than the three seat license at $59.99. Anyone weighing a second machine is already past the break even point for the larger tier. Above five seats, the page directs buyers to contact BZG for enterprise pricing and custom licenses.

Every tier includes the same thing: unlimited app creation, bug fixes and minor updates, support, and the ability to hand exported apps to other licensed users. There is no feature-gated edition to compare, which removes a whole axis from the decision. The only variable that changes with price is how many machines the license covers, so the question reduces to counting desks rather than reading a feature matrix twice.

One license, one Mac at a time

A license is not a household allowance. Support documentation states that each Unite Pro license activates on one Mac at a time, and moving it requires deactivating on the original machine first, from the Unite menu. That step needs an internet connection.

The failure case is predictable. A Mac gets wiped and sold, the license was never released, and the new machine reports that the license code has already been utilized. The published fix is to deactivate on the original Mac, or, if that machine is gone, to contact support with the purchase email so the activation can be reset. Deactivate before you erase, and this never comes up.

The subscription route carries a different obligation. Apps created by a Setapp-activated copy require Unite to be opened at least once every 30 days so the subscription can be verified. Cross that line and the created apps show a verification dialog until Unite is opened again. For someone who builds apps once and never reopens the tool, that is a behavior worth knowing before choosing the route.

What the free tier actually covers

The trial is bounded by count, not by calendar. Without a license you can create one app, use every feature inside that app, and edit it as many times as you like. Nothing expires after two weeks.

A license unlocks four specific things: creating more than one app, exporting apps as backup files, importing from those backups, and migrating apps made with Unite 6 or earlier into the Pro format. That shape has a practical consequence. The free tier is enough to settle whether the heaviest daily site behaves correctly inside a wrapper, which is the question most worth settling before paying. It is not enough to settle whether a whole setup survives a move to a new machine, because export is the licensed part.

It also means the evaluation should be spent on the hardest site rather than the easiest one. A simple documentation page will work anywhere. The site that will expose a problem is the one with a complicated login, an embedded editor, or a stream of live updates, and that is the one worth spending the single free slot on.

Paid major upgrades, and how often they have arrived

The license is scoped to a major version. The current one covers the 1.x line, and the purchase page spells out how that boundary works:

When you purchase a Unite 6.x license, it will work specifically for all 6.x releases. Source: bzgapps.com

BZG frames this as an alternative to a subscription: licensing by major version avoids recurring charges while still funding continued development, with discounts offered when a new major version arrives.

The changelog turns that policy into a number. Unite 1.0 shipped December 4, 2017. Version 2.0 arrived in December 2018, 3.0 in December 2019, 4.0 in December 2020, 5.0 in September 2023, and 6.0 on March 3, 2025. The 6.x line ended with 6.6 on February 11, 2026, and Unite Pro 1.0 shipped a month later on March 9, 2026.

So the gap between paid milestones has run from roughly one year to about two and a half. Anyone budgeting three years should expect one upgrade prompt inside that window. Existing owners are not paying full price again: the purchase page offers up to 35 percent off for Unite 6.x users moving to Pro, and the same figure for owners of other BZG apps.

Minor releases have been frequent in between. Between 1.0 in March 2026 and 1.8 on August 30, 2026, there were more than ten releases in under six months. A perpetual license here does not mean a frozen app.

Subscription math, honestly stated

The Setapp listing prices the subscription from $14.99 per month with a 7 day free trial, and activation happens automatically with no license key. Against $39.99 for a single seat, the one-time purchase pays for itself in under three months.

That arithmetic is misleading on its own, because the subscription is not a price for this app. It is a price for a catalogue of hundreds of apps. The honest split is by intent. If nothing else in that catalogue will get used, buy the license. If the subscription already exists for other reasons, the marginal cost of adding this tool is zero. There is no third answer that a spreadsheet will produce.

There is also a bundle with the same company's Chrome-based tool: $59.99 for one Mac, $79.99 for three, and $139.99 for five, which the comparison page lists as savings of $19.99, $39.99, and $59.99 against buying separately.

Whether the apps you build can travel

Seat count is the obvious question. Portability is the one that surfaces later, usually on the day a machine gets replaced, and the documented procedure has several steps that each depend on holding a license.

The published sequence for moving to a new Mac runs like this. Export every app as a .uniteconfig file on the old machine. Move those files across by AirDrop, iCloud Drive, or an external disk. Install Unite Pro on the new machine, deactivate the license on the old one, activate on the new one, then import each file to recreate the apps. Sessions, bookmarks, and saved passwords inside created apps live under the user Library folder in Application Support, so that folder can be carried over as well if signed-in state should survive the move.

Two consequences follow from that. First, export and import are licensed features, so an app built and refined during the free tier cannot be carried anywhere. Whatever gets built while evaluating should be treated as disposable. Second, handing a built app to a colleague works only if the recipient also holds a license, since apps cannot be shared with unlicensed users. A team that wants one standard configuration distributed across desks is buying seats for everyone who receives it, not just for whoever built it.

Discounts, refunds, and the fourteen days that follow

Payment runs through Paddle, and license details arrive by email after purchase. If that email is lost later, support can retrieve the license rather than requiring a second purchase. Students get 20 percent off through a designated service. Seats can be added later by contacting support, so an initial single-seat purchase is not a dead end if a second machine appears. Refunds are available within 14 days of purchase.

Worth stacking these in the right order: the upgrade discount for existing 6.x owners and the loyalty discount for owners of other apps from the same developer are both listed at up to 35 percent, and the bundle discount applies to buying two tools together. Anyone who already owns something from this developer should check which of these applies before paying list price, since the difference on a five seat license is not small.

That refund window is the real test period, because the free tier caps you at one app. Use those 14 days to build every app you actually intend to keep, then check three things: whether the Dock still makes sense with that many icons, whether every login flow completes inside the app, and whether the macOS-level extras you care about work with the specific services you use. The third one depends on which sites are supported, which is checkable before buying rather than after.

What to change first

Fix the constraints before shopping: which Macs must run it, how many apps you need, and what a paid upgrade in year two would mean for you. With those three written down, the Pricing page becomes a short read rather than a comparison exercise, and the Supported services list tells you in seconds whether the integrations you rely on exist at all. If the answer turns out to be one app on one Mac, start free and spend nothing, including with tools like Kagemusha that cap their free tier by app count rather than by time.