Activation problems

Every message Charter shows when a key is refused means something specific. This page maps them to causes.

"Already activated for a different Azure DevOps organisation"

A subscription covers one organisation and this one is not it.

Sign in to the Polar customer portal with the email address you paid with — there is no password — then open your purchase, find the activation (it is labelled with the organisation name it is bound to) and deactivate it. The key can then be activated here.

Polar returns the same response for a few other situations, so if the subscription is genuinely not in use anywhere else, check it is still active.

"This license key was issued for \<organisation\>, but Charter is running in \<organisation\>"

An invoiced key is bound to a specific organisation GUID and is being used in a different one. The message names both so you can see which is which. If the ID supplied at purchase was wrong, contact support and the key is reissued at no charge.

"This license key failed its signature check"

The key text has been altered. Almost always this is a copy-and-paste problem — a line break introduced by an email client, or a truncated selection. Copy it again in full.

"This license key is not a Charter key"

A key for a different product, or the organisation ID pasted into the key box by mistake. Both values are GUIDs shown a few lines apart on the same tab, so this is an easy slip.

"This license expired on \<date\>"

An invoiced key past its expiry and past the seven-day grace period. Renew to reactivate.

"This subscription is no longer active"

An online subscription that has been cancelled, refunded or has lapsed. Renew it in the Polar customer portal, signing in with the email address you paid with.

"Charter could not reach Polar"

A network problem, not a verdict on your key. Charter honours its last successful check for up to seven days, so a brief outage changes nothing. If it persists, your collection may not have outbound access to api.polar.sh — contact support and an offline key can be issued instead.

"This build of Charter cannot validate subscription keys yet"

An old build. Update the extension.

Nothing happened at all

If pasting a key produces no visible response, check that you are in the right organisation and that the page is not a stale tab. Charter logs the outcome of every activation attempt to the browser console, which distinguishes a refusal that was not displayed from a request that was never sent.