Your customer account

The customer account portal holds your licenses, sites, offsite backups, support cases, and team. Each page carries its own controls; this page carries the explanations.

Sign in #

An account is how you get a license. Every install of Skans carries one, Community included — it is free, and it issues the moment you ask. Signing up is the only step before it.

Two-factor #

Protect the account with an authenticator: scan the code with Bitwarden, 1Password, Google or Microsoft Authenticator and type the six digits. Changing a factor needs a sign-in from the last few minutes (10 for re-issue). Replacing an authenticator keeps the current one working until a code from the new app is verified. Keep at least one second factor connected: set up an authenticator before removing a passkey. Changing the password signs the account out everywhere else. A password is usually changed because someone else might have had it.

Recovery codes #

Each recovery code signs you in once if you lose the authenticator.

• The code set is shown once, at enrollment. The service keeps only hashes, so it cannot show them again or recover them for you. Put them in a password manager, or print them and keep them with the important paper. If you lose both the authenticator and the codes, there is no way back in.
• Each code works once. Re-issuing a set stops every old code, printed ones included.

Account security #

Sessions lists every browser signed in. Browsers of the same type and network are grouped, the current sign-in is shown separately, and every sign-in in a group can be ended together. If one is unfamiliar, end it and change the password.

Deleting the account is permanent: license keys are revoked with it, so any appliance still using one stops receiving content at its next check-in. The record that keys were issued stays — that is a business record, not personal data.

Request more time #

If a renewal is waiting on a purchase order or an approval, say what it is waiting on. The team can extend the grace period for the license. The request is free: it arrives as a support case, and the reply lands there.

Shop #

Monthly and yearly purchases renew until cancelled in Manage billing; a term of two years or more is paid once and simply ends. Hour blocks and support incidents are non-refundable and stay on the account until used. Renewing early keeps remaining time; one license per checkout, paid once.

• Device packs require a paid edition; Community has 25 devices per site. Expansion blocks renew with their license when they would otherwise end first, each charged only for the additional time.
• Edition upgrades go through sales, quoted with credit for unused paid time before anything is approved. Larger engagements can go on an invoice — ask on the engagement thread.
• Card purchase may be switched off on some portals; Community stays free, and sales takes anything else.
• Storage estimates are capacity guidance, not a retention guarantee; estimates appear after the appliance reports fresh counts.

Sites #

Assign each license to one site and the estate reads by site instead of by key. Appliances follow their licenses. Online means a check-in within 30 minutes; offline means a longer gap, not confirmation the appliance is powered off. Sanitizer seat licenses are account-wide and never count as unassigned.

Vault #

Each site license can hold encrypted offsite copies. A site can have more than one vault; Sanitizer seat licenses do not include one. Copies are encrypted with a key only the site holds: losing both the appliance and its recovery sheet loses the copies for anyone, Skans included. Print the recovery sheet from the appliance and keep it off-site.

• Enroll codes work once, for a day, and are shown once — a reload will not show them again. A lost code is replaced by issuing a new one, which voids it. Re-enrolling revokes the site’s previous credential.
• Region is fixed at the first enrollment and cannot be changed after.
• Retention follows time periods, never a copy count: full backups keep the first complete copy in each daily, weekly, monthly and yearly period plus the newest in each set; differential and log backups keep the last full before the daily restore window plus everything since. Increasing retention applies immediately. Only the license owner can reduce it, after confirming identity, and a reduction waits out the lock on today’s stored copies.
• Deleted copies still count until their lock expires. Nothing on the page deletes a backup: retention does, once the lock has passed.
• Auto-grow is off by default. At 90% usage (including reserved uploads) it adds the next storage step at most once per 24 hours: +100 GB subscribed, otherwise a +250 GB Vault subscription, each billed monthly after confirmed payment. The charge ceiling covers automatic expansion payments per UTC calendar month including tax; the recurring ceiling limits the resulting monthly bill. Manual purchases are separate, and nothing is deleted when a ceiling or payment blocks growth.
• Billing: the subscription is bought per site, on that license’s Offsite backups page. A subscription not card-billed here (set up by Skans, or paid by another account) is changed or ended through support, not Manage billing.
• Restoring without the appliance: download the copies and the manifest, then run the Skans recovery kit (PowerShell or bash, free, no license needed) on any machine with the site’s key from the printed recovery sheet. A series is one database or artifact, oldest first: to restore a point in time, take the last full at or before it, then the last diff after that full, then every log after that up to the point. A download is the encrypted file exactly as the appliance sent it, named by its id; the manifest maps each id to its real name, encrypted with the site’s key. The kit restores each copy’s real name and refuses a copy whose SHA-256 is not the one sealed into its name.
• Deleting a vault revokes every appliance credential immediately and schedules every copy for deletion. Destroy the site’s backup key on the appliance and every printed recovery sheet to make the copies unreadable; each copy is purged when its lock expires. It cannot be undone.

Support #

Start with the documentation or system status; a free setup question goes to [email protected]. Email help is best effort with no guaranteed response time; for a production outage include the impact and when it began. A case is one question for one ticket (by card, included with Enterprise); priority describes the impact, not a response deadline. Tickets are non-refundable, except that a case which turns out to be a Skans defect returns its ticket unused.

Opening a case needs one ticket credit; the payment page opens in a new tab so the draft keeps what was typed. After payment, return and refresh the credit.

Services #

Requesting an engagement costs nothing. The services team estimates the hours and answers on the engagement’s page; hours leave the account only when the work is scheduled, and the page says if more are needed first. Hour blocks are sold in fixed-size remote blocks; unused hours stay on the account, and the Shop sells them ahead of time. A terminal engagement takes no more hours.

Team #

The team shares licenses, appliances, and support cases; each person uses their own login and second factor. Only the owner or an admin invites people.

Locking someone out disables sign-in, ends all portal sessions, revokes passkeys and field keys, and removes them from the next technician roster. Site access closes when the offline signer publishes and each appliance syncs; offline sites may need local closure. Re-enabling sign-in is separate, and field keys stay revoked.

Technicians #

MSPs and integrators manage access across customer sites; each customer approves access on their own appliance. The portal can only close a technician’s access — it cannot open an account, approve a visit, or change anything else. That is deliberate: a compromise of the portal cannot let anyone into a customer site.

• An MSP is claimed by the owner of the organization’s account with an owner claim code; the MSP then attaches to the account’s organization for the whole team.
• A roster is a signed statement of who works there, and the signing key is not held in the cloud — nobody, Skans included, can forge the staff list. A published roster is verified against the pinned key before anything stores it. Offboarding a technician is a roster change: sign a new roster without them and publish it; it lands when every appliance shows the new sequence. Until a roster is published, no appliance revokes anybody.
• Invitation codes are shown once and cannot be shown again; a lost or misdirected one is revoked and replaced. Give the code to the customer, not the technician: redeeming only tells their appliance who is asking — the customer’s own approval is still what opens anything.
• An appliance that has not checked in may be offline, or the customer may have stopped being governed alone, without telling anyone. The page cannot tell the difference and will not guess.

NOC #

The network operations center shows every customer and every appliance in one view. Hidden tiles stay hidden on this browser only — the board itself is unchanged. Check-in alerts use the configured offline-minutes threshold; a late check-in does not confirm the appliance is powered off. Active is the license state; last seen is the most recent license check-in and does not confirm appliance or device state.

• Near me centers the map from the connection; saving an office centers it somewhere exact. The choice is remembered for that person only; a deleted office falls back to Near me. The browser’s location only fills the office fields and is sent only on Save.
• Offices are shared with the organization; only an owner or an admin can add, change or delete them.

Settings #

• The email address is the sign-in and where licenses go.
• Connected sign-ins are checked after the Skans second factor. An account with no password gets in only through a connected sign-in — set a password from the sign-in page’s reset link before disconnecting one.
• CVE watch emails are per company: CISA covers known exploited vulnerabilities and industrial-control advisories; matches include NVD and CISA, and the recap adds a weekly summary. License, security, and support emails always continue.
• The account’s data (name, company, phone, address, sign-in addresses, issued licenses) can be exported or deleted from Settings.

Supply chain #

Lookups read public evidence by brand and model, FCC ID or MAC prefix; each regime answers a different question. Public registry facts are likely-identification evidence; covered flags require an approved entity association. Datasheet upload reads literal fields from one text PDF (deleted after reading; its SHA-256 identifies the document) and shows the physical PDF page. Assessment of public and device evidence; not legal advice. Missing evidence does not establish compliance.