PLATES
Download Plates
Free, and free the way the word is supposed to mean: no account, no card, not even an email address. Nothing to sign up to, nothing to dismiss, no trial counting down. Every byte of your training lives on the machine you install it on.
For your computer
Every platform
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Windows
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macOS
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Linux
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Android
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iPhone & iPad
What you get without paying anything
The whole app. Every module — the Logbook, the Archive, the Workshop, your Profile — and Spotter, the in-app assistant, running on a small model on your own machine. There are no ads, no nags and no feature behind a countdown.
Two things are not in the free apps, and both for the same reason: they need a server, and a server costs money every month. Your devices do not sync to each other — the free desktop app and the free phone app are each an island, because there is no cloud in between them — and the appearance settings are one theme, light or dark. If you want the rest, Deluxe is what pays for the machine in the middle.
Your computer may warn you the first time
Plates is not code-signed yet, and that is a money decision rather than a technical one. The certificates that stop these warnings are rented, not bought: roughly £79 a year to Apple, and £200–£400 a year for the Windows one, every year, forever. Plates is one person with no revenue, so that money would come out of building the thing you are about to download. It gets paid for out of subscriptions, not before them.
So you may see one of the screens below. It is worth being precise about what it means: your computer is telling you nobody has paid to vouch for this developer. It is not telling you it found anything wrong with the file, and it would say exactly the same thing about a signed app whose certificate had lapsed. Every small developer's first release gets it.
- Windows: a blue “Windows protected your PC” screen. Click More info, then Run anyway.
- macOS: “Plates cannot be opened because it is from an unidentified developer.” Right-click the app and choose Open, then Open again.
- Linux: no warning at all — but a downloaded AppImage will not start until it is marked executable. See below.
If you would rather not click through a warning, that is a completely reasonable thing to decide — wait for a signed build, and nothing is lost: the web app needs no download at all, and your training history is the same either way.
Running it on Linux
An AppImage is the whole app in one file — nothing to install, and deleting the file uninstalls it. What it is not is runnable on arrival: a browser saves it without permission to execute, so double-clicking it does nothing at all and no error is shown. That is the file behaving exactly as downloaded files are supposed to, and it catches everybody once.
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In your file manager: right-click
Plates-1.0.0.AppImage→ Properties → Permissions → tick Allow executing file as program. Then double-click it. -
Or in a terminal:
chmod +x Plates-1.0.0.AppImagethen./Plates-1.0.0.AppImage
If it reports something about FUSE — Ubuntu 24.04 and some others no
longer ship it — run
./Plates-1.0.0.AppImage --appimage-extract-and-run, which unpacks it
instead of mounting it. Either way it needs no root, installs nothing system-wide, and
keeps your training in a database under your home folder.
For anyone who would rather check than trust, the SHA-256 of each file is listed
below. Compare it after downloading — shasum -a 256 <file>
on macOS or Linux, Get-FileHash <file> in PowerShell.
- Windows
Plates-Setup-1.0.0.exe7bdb39a37803680dec5eee3075ebc432a6e2b6851b8dad1bf41d5b03d71d78b4- macOS · Apple Silicon
Plates-1.0.0-arm64.dmg9d3b6511f21ad60ff4d7c238e0166e88d4687a1e29cae9896675a42fbd5cada7- macOS · Intel
Plates-1.0.0.dmgf32c872e61013154c9a65001c9271713009c9bf43c96c972c78c40e201d87967- Linux
Plates-1.0.0.AppImagea57e026310408df8304ed31356bbd32930474906b5abaea73eec958352a3626d