Giveaway of the Day is a service where users can download commercial software for free in daily 24-hour giveaways. Each day, a new software is being promoted on the site, and while its usually not the latest or most powerful version of an application, it is often still a great deal.
The site restricts the software activation to that 24-hour period which means that you can neither download the application afterwards nor install it at a later point in time.
If you happen to install it once the giveaway has ended, you’ll notice that the setup will block the installation. This is handled by a wrapper application that checks the Giveaway of the Day server if the giveaway is still running.
This can be a issue for users who want to install the program anew after they had operating system troubles or other issues on their computer, or who simply cannot install the program on the day of the giveaway.
GaotD Setup Keeper is a free, open source application for Windows that unwraps the software installer from the Giveaway of the Day wrapper. All you need to do is to use the application during the giveaway period to process it locally. You’ll end up with the program setup file that you can use to install the application whenever you see it fit.
A click on Downloader displays the selection menu where you can select to download the software or the game that is offered on the Giveaway website.
Once you have downloaded the file you need to start the setup of the program like you normally would. Switch to the Setup Keeper window and select Setup Keeper > Software / Game to copy the installer to a selected directory on your computer.
You can use this installer then later (that is after the giveaway period) to install the program and have it activated automatically.
The latest version of Setup Keeper requires a debug library that is usually not found on non-development systems. Check out Fix The Program Can’t Start Because MSVCR100D.dll Is Missing From Your Computer on how to add it to your system, or wait until the program is re-compiled by the developer without that dependency.
You can download Setup Keeper from Sourceforge.
Update: The program is not working anymore at the time of writing. Use UnWrapper GOTD instead. This new application, the latest version appears to be 2.04, offers two major features when it comes to Giveaway of the Day.
Before we look at those, a word of caution: the program behaves like a hacking tool, and since this is the case, it is flagged by numerous antivirus and security solutions as malicious. A recent scan on Virustotal for instance returned 30 hits out of 56 which usually is a clear sign that something’s wrong with the program.
Most antivirus solutions flag it as generic, which is a sign more often than not that those are false positives. I’d still suggest you be careful when using the program, and best use a sandboxing or virtualization solution when using it.
UnWrapper GOTD has two main features. First, it can extract the setup and activation file from any given Giveaway of the Day installer so that you can run it at a later point in time.
Second, it can even do that for expired giveaways which can be useful if you did not have time to use the program on the day of the giveaway or came across a copy of a program that was offered earlier on the site.
How to use it
- Run the Unwrapper GOTD executable file after extracting it on your system. You may need to whitelist in your antivirus client as it may be flagged and removed automatically by it.
- It opens an “open file” dialog which you use to select the activate.exe or setup.exe file from the giveaway package.
- The program processes the file and creates a Registry file in the same folder as the activate.exe file which you use to register the program on installation.
The process is slightly different if the Giveaway has expired already. If that is the case, do the following instead:
- Create a new text file in the folder that you extracted the giveaway package to, for instance by right-clicking and selecting new > text document. Name it gotd_keys.txt.
- Run Unwrapper GOTD afterwards and select the activate.exe or setup.exe file.
- The program will tell you that it is running in offline mode, and that the key for the program has been saved to the text file you created earlier.
- Run the application again, and select activate.exe or setup.exe again when prompted for it.
- The program reads the key that was previously saved, and will create the registry file afterwards.
Here is a video that shows the program in action