Do you want to license and sell a software product? Then you might be interested in understanding the differences between subscription VS usage-based licensing. The two licensing models are beneficial in different ways, and we will in this blog give you guidance on what to choose.
If you want to read more about licensing models, please read our help pages. We made the following video covering subscription VS usage-based licensing:
When to choose usage-based licensing
First of all, what is usage-based licensing, and how does it work? Usage-based licensing is when you charge a customer for a specific action. For example, you might sell software to photographers where they can edit photos. Instead of charging your customers a subscription fee once a month, you can charge a customer per photo that they edit in your software.
One benefit is that you can charge the customer more fairly. Enterprises that use your software every day pay a high price. Startups that use your software once in a while are allowed to pay a lower price.
So when should you opt to charge per usage instead of a subscription fee? The value that your customers get from your product must be highly correlated to the specific action you want to charge for. This simply means that the actions you charge for need to provide a lot of value to your customers.
Your editing software from the example provides value to your customer only when the customer edits a photo. Therefore, it is appropriate to consider usage-based licensing for such a software product.
When to choose subscriptions
Great! But when is it not a good idea to charge customers for certain actions? We covered earlier that usage-based licensing allows you to attract both small and large customers since they can have their own prices depending on their usage.
If you are selling multi-purpose software where you cannot find one specific action that gives all of your customers a lot of value, subscriptions can still allow you to charge customers different prices.
By implementing different pricing plans with different feature sets, you can motivate enterprises to pay a higher subscription fee to get full access to your product. Startups can then get a more basic version without all of the features at a smaller price.
Cryptolens makes it effortless to license and sell any type of software application, no matter if you want to implement subscriptions or usage-based licensing.
When you have a lot of licenses in the Cryptolens platform, it can be useful to search for specific properties such as blocked/active, the created-on date, and so on. In this blog, we feature some of the queries you can run to effectively filter search results in Cryptolens.
This blog is based on the following two help pages relating to sorting and ordering. For a video guide, please watch the following YouTube video.
Searching licenses using Linq Queries
One of the most basic ways of searching for licenses is to simply paste the license key into the search field.
You can also search for all licenses with a specific property. For example, you can find every license key that has Feature 1 set as true by pasting the following text into the search field.
f1=True
You can use the same logic to search license keys based on other features. Below, you will find the query for finding blocked licenses.
Block=True
If you instead want to find all licenses with the period set to 30, you can do so by pasting the following query into the search field.
Period=30
Advanced searching
A more advanced way of searching for licenses is to find licenses that have been issued after a particular date. To do so, please see the following query example.
created > DateTime(2024,05,01)
The same logic can be applied with the parameter “expires”.
Furthermore, you can search for all license keys that have been activated on a device. For this example, let’s find all license keys that have at least 2 activated devices.
ActivatedMachines.Count() >= 2
Let us now assume that you just received an email from a customer saying that they have lost their license key, but they provided their machine code.
You can then search for licenses that have been activated by a particular machine ID using the following query:
You would simply replace “machine code” with the machine ID of your customer.
There is a similar way to search for license keys if you are using the API. The method is called GetKeys, and the same queries can be used if you prefer to use the API.
There are many more properties you can use to filter search results in Cryptolens, and we have them all listed here.
Customizing the order of license keys
As you can see in the Cryptolens dashboard, there are different preset ways of ordering license keys. For example, you can order by feature and creation date.
For more advanced customization of the ordering, please visit this help page.
If you have any questions, please contact [email protected]. Thank you so much for reading!
Are you working on a software application that you one day want to sell? Then you need to think about software licensing early on. No, I am not talking about End-User License Agreements (EULA) or legal documents, I am talking about a software licensing system – the system that ensures that only customers get access to the application.
Why is a software licensing system so important? Because without it, you simply cannot sell a software application to customers.
In this blog, I will briefly, and in a non-technical, way describe what a software licensing system really is, and how it can enable you to take your software passion and turn it into a business.
We have also made a YouTube video about this blog if you prefer to watch rather than read (like me).
What is a software licensing system?
To make this blog a bit more fun, picture the following analogy. Let’s say that your software application is like a house. The different rooms of the house are the different features in your application. One room can house the most basic features, and another room can house more advanced functionality.
Without software licensing, your application does not have any locks. Users can enter whatever room they feel like without paying at all! It becomes clear that no one would ever pay for such a product, since everyone can just use it without paying.
A software licensing system would establish a lock on the front door, making sure that only people with a key can access your application.
How does this system work in practice? That is a great question! So great that we will cover it fully in a future blog post. For now, let us just assume that the system indeed works as it should.
Software licensing performs key verification
The next step for us is then to create keys for the front door and give them to our customers when their payment has gone through. In software licensing terms, that key is a digital license key that is unique to each customer.
So what happens when a customer tries to enter our application? In the most basic setup, they will be greeted by a locked front door. After providing their license key, the software licensing system checks so that their license key is valid, and if it is, the door is unlocked and the customer can begin to use the application.
The customer can then leave the application, and the key verification process is repeated whenever they try to run the application once more.
If a non-customer tries to access the application, they will be greeted by the same locked front door. Without a key, they cannot enter!
Some software applications choose to charge a customer a subscription fee. Monthly or yearly subscription fees are the most common ones. Then it can be useful to block the license key of customers who stop paying their fee. If such a customer, or ex-customer, tries to use the application, they will not be let in. That is because their license key stopped being valid when they stopped paying.
Charge extra for more features
Now you know the basic setup, but what about the different rooms I mentioned earlier? Let’s suppose that the house has two rooms, one with basic features, and one with more advanced functionalities.
It is sometimes beneficial to charge customers extra for using the more advanced features. You can then create two different types of license keys for the different rooms. A green license could, for example, cost $100 and give customers access to the basic features of your application. A red license could instead cost $500 and give customers access to all of the features in your application.
The moral of the story
So that’s it, right? Is software licensing really that simple?
Of course, it isn’t. But we hope that the simple analogy gave you an introduction to software licensing and how it enables you to sell a software application.
But remember – although a software licensing system enables you to sell your application, it alone can never make your application good enough for customers to want to buy it.
When you are thinking about licensing and selling your software product, you probably come across the question “How do you implement a software licensing system?” In this blog, we will cover the basics of Cryptolens so you can get an idea of how you can implement a software licensing system and start to license and sell your software product.
Please visit our help pages if you want to learn more. You can also learn about software licensing basics in the following video:
Let us begin with the SDK. Cryptolens offers comprehensive SDKs in your favorite programming languages to make it effortless to implement a Licensing as a Service (LaaS) platform within minutes. Install our SDK in your language here.
Create a free Cryptolens account to get access to our easy-to-use dashboard where you can create and manage license keys and restrictions. You can also find your access tokens and other parameters that you have to insert into your code. Cryptolens offers you a way to implement licensing for free at your own pace, and you only have to pay when you get customers of your own. Check out our pricing plans here.
The last step is to insert a code snippet into your application’s code. We provide comprehensive help guides to make the implementation seem effortless. The following image gives a summary of how our code snippet looks. See the code snippet in your programming language here.
Are you new to Cryptolens? Welcome! We are dedicated to offering an easy-to-use Licensing as a Service (LaaS) platform so you can license and sell your software application within minutes.
Users expect some software products to run in offline settings. Then, the software needs offline license verifications to confirm the customer’s license key. In this blog, we will cover how to set up offline verification in theory and in practice, regarding two major use cases:
1. When a customer is allowed to temporarily be offline (for example, use the license while they are in airplane mode).
2. When a customer is allowed to permanently be offline (for example, behind a corporate firewall).
This blog is based on the following page in our documentation.
Here is a YouTube video covering the same topic:
Background
Let us refresh our memory of the standard license key verification code. For the remainder of this blog, we will cover example codes in Python, but the process is similar in other languages.
result = Key.activate(token=auth,\
rsa_pub_key=RSAPubKey,\
product_id=3349, \
key="ICVLD-VVSZR-ZTICT-YKGXL",\
machine_code=Helpers.GetMachineCode(v=2))
if result[0] == None or not Helpers.IsOnRightMachine(result[0], v=2):
# an error occurred or the key is invalid or it cannot be activated
# (eg. the limit of activated devices was achieved)
print("The license does not work: {0}".format(result[1]))
else:
# everything went fine if we are here!
print("The license is valid!")
When Key.Activate is called, it calls Cryptolens API, which in turn returns a signed JSON object placed in the result variable. This allows you to proceed as normal and check features, expiry dates, and other parameters. In the code above, we are checking if the license is activated on the correct machine.
Using the following code in Python, we can save the JSON object to disk, allowing us to read it again when the customer lacks internet access.
# res is obtained from the code above
if result[0] != None:
# saving license file to disk
with open('licensefile.skm', 'w') as f:
f.write(result[0].save_as_string())
Case 1 – Temporarily offline
If customers are expected to be offline once in a while, it is considered good practice to always attempt to make the key.activate call, and only load the saved license file from disk if the customer is offline and key.activate fails.
The following Python code example shows you how to load the saved license file from disk:
# read license file from file
with open('licensefile.skm', 'r') as f:
license_key = LicenseKey.load_from_string(pubKey, f.read(), 30)
if license_key == None or not Helpers.IsOnRightMachine(license_key, v=2):
print("NOTE: This license file does not belong to this machine.")
else:
print("Feature 1: " + str(license_key.f1))
print("License expires: " + str(license_key.expires))
Notice that the parameter load_from_string has “30” set as a parameter. This means that the customer is only allowed to use the software offline for 30 days. You can customize this value so it suits your use case. For example, you may want to change it to 7, if you only want to allow a customer to be offline for a week.
When the date has been reached, the customer will need a new license file (which may be obtained by successfully calling key.activate), which can be done with the LoadFromFile method.
You could also remove the “30” parameter if you do not want to set a limit at all.
If you want to see more code examples in Python, please visit our GitHub page.
Case 2 – Permanently offline
To support customers to be fully offline and still use your software for a long period of time, you would have to send the license file to your customers since they cannot call key.activate.
There are four methods you can use:
Calling key.activate on your end and sending the file to your customer. You can automate this method.
Using Activation forms hosted by Cryptolens for an easier solution.
Obtaining the file manually in the dashboard.
An On-premise License Server by Cryptolens for when you anticipate many end users or want to support floating licenses offline.
1:
The first method is where you call key.activate on your end and send the license file to your customer, for example, over an email. If you would like, you could set up an automized way where your customers can request to download their license file from your dashboard. This could, however, become somewhat complex.
2:
An easier way is to use activation forms by Cryptolens. When inside the Cryptolens dashboard, open the tab called “Forms”, and click on Activation Forms. This form performs a call to key.activate much like you would do on your own in the previous method, but we provide a simpler GUI for your and your customer’s convenience.
Using the form, customers can simply enter their license key and machine code, click on active, and they will obtain their license file that they can insert on their machines.
3:
You can also manually download the license file from the Cryptolens dashboard. Go to the desired product page, find the license key you want to download the license file of, and click on the yellow wrench icon to the right of the key. Click on “Download activation file” and send it in your desired way to your customer.
4:
All of the above-mentioned methods are useful when there are only a few employees on site who would use your software offline. But, if you anticipate that your customers will have many end users, or if you want to support floating licenses offline, you can use an on-premise license server that Cryptolens provides. Please read the documentation relating to the on-premise license server to learn more about this approach.
Thank you for reading this blog about setting up offline license verifications in Cryptolens, please feel free to ask questions to [email protected].
A common question when selling and licensing a software application is “How does software licensing work?”. Understanding the basics of software licensing allows you to make smarter decisions when it comes to monetizing your software.
It is crucial that your software is able to know who is allowed access and for how long. Depending on what licensing model you choose, the software licensing system will behave differently. We are briefly explaining how software licensing works in this blog.
You can also watch the associated YouTube video:
Explaining how software licensing works
A licensing as a service (LaaS) provider such as Cryptolens will do most of the heavy lifting. When a user of your software signs up, your software sends a request to a license server. The license server then checks if all of the requirements are met. For example, was the customer’s last payment successful?
If all of the requirements are satisfied, the license server sends a response back to your software that tells it to run as normal. If, for example, the customer did not pay their last payment, the license server will tell your software to display a message telling the customer what they need to do to gain access to the software again.
In some instances, your software may be unable to send a request to the license server. For example, your software might be running without Internet access. Your software would then use a license file on disk or call an on-premise license server. At Cryptolens, we provide methods of doing both of the options to our customers.
We have now answered the question “How does software licensing work?”. If you are new to Cryptolens, welcome to our site! We enable our customers to license and sell any type of software application. With help guides in your favorite programming language, you can implement software licensing within minutes. Hundreds of industry-leading customers worldwide are already using our software licensing manager.
Welcome! This blog is covering our feature called “Start countdown upon activation in Cryptolens”, also referred to as “Trial Activation”. We will first go through when this feature is useful in theory, we will then cover a basic setup, followed by a more advanced use case for when you allow multiple machines to use the same license. Please read our documentation page for more information.
Please watch the video below if you would rather take in this information as a video:
In theory
Let’s suppose that we have a time-limited license issued today that should be valid for 30 days. Normally, the countdown will begin as soon as the license is created. However, this can be problematic if you want to create a list of licenses before they reach your customers, and you are unsure when your customers will activate their licenses.
Ideally, you want the license to be valid for 30 days after the customer has activated the license, and not 30 days after you created the licenses. That is where the feature we will cover today comes in handy.
Basic setup
For the basic setup, we will cover an example where you want to create a time-limited license limited to one machine only, and you want the countdown to begin upon activation.
Sign in to Cryptolens and create a license key as you normally do by pressing the blue “Create a new key” button for your desired product.
In the red bottom right card, you will see a checkbox called “Start countdown upon activation”. Please click this checkbox and click on Create.
Make sure you always click that checkbox for all of the licenses you create where you want the countdown to begin only when the customer activates their license.
Advanced use case
What if we want to start the countdown of a license upon activation for a license that is limited to more than one machine?
With the basic setup, each new activation will reset the countdown. Let’s say that you have set up a license that is limited to 30 days. If your customer activates the license on one machine and activates the license on another machine 7 days later, the license will be valid for another 30 days. This means it will be valid for 37 days in total.
If you allow for more than two machines, this phenomenon can then naturally happen more than once. The license might then be valid for even longer.
Using data objects, you can make sure that only the first machine will activate the countdown, and that the other machines will not affect or reset the countdown.
Go to the product you want to implement this feature on. Click on “Data Objects”.
Copy the following code and paste it into the “Name” field:
cryptolens_trialactivation
Copy the following code and paste it into the “StringValue” field:
first_activation
For the chosen product, the countdown will now be activated the first time a customer activates the license on a machine, but new machines will not affect the behavior of the countdown at all.
Now you know how to start the countdown upon activation in Cryptolens. We are happy to answer any questions you might have! Send them either to our chat support or email the questions to [email protected].
Companies often face a challenge when choosing between floating and node-locked licenses. The two licensing models both handle the issue of setting a maximum number of machines that can use a license key at the same time. However, there are significant differences.
The main benefits of each model will be explained in this blog. You can also watch the following video on YouTube:
Floating and Node-locked licenses
For the node-locked licensing model, let us assume that your client uses your license key on Machine A and B. If you want to activate Machine C, you first have to deactivate either A or B.
Floating licenses instead allow you to put a constraint to only allow, for example, 10 machines to use the license at the same time. The client can then install the application on, for example, 100 machines, but only be able to have 10 machines use the license key at the same time.
Floating licenses are therefore better if you know in advance that your customer will be moving machines and the most important aspect for you is that they do not use the license on more than a set number of machines.
Node-locked licenses are then best if you know that a customer will only use the license on a specific set of machines, and given that they will not switch machines often.
We hope we have now answered the question “Choosing between floating and node-locked licenses”. For a more in-depth description of the two licensing models and a guide on how to implement them in practice, please read our documentation.
Are you new to Cryptolens? Welcome! We make it effortless for software creators to license and sell any type of application, in any programming language. Our software licensing system integrates with leading providers such as PayPal and Stripe to make payments secure.
Join hundreds of innovative and world-leading software companies – get started with Cryptolens today!
Choosing between the different software license types is a crucial decision when you are planning on licensing and selling your software product. That is why we are answering the question “What are different types of software licenses? to help you get started.
We will now briefly introduce some of the most common software licensing models that we offer to our customers. If you want to read more in detail, please visit our documentation pages.
This blog is also available as a YouTube video:
Types of software licenses
One of the most common types is called a perpetual license. That is when you charge a customer once, and they get full access to your product forever. A subscription is when you are continuously charging a customer. They are only granted access to your application if they continue to pay. The most common subscriptions are paid on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis.
It might also be beneficial to charge the customer only when they use the software or its features. For example, if you sell an accounting software product, you could charge your customers for each financial report they create using the software. This licensing model is called usage-based licensing.
Lastly, some companies want to allow only a limited number of machines to use their software at the same time. This can be done using node-locking or floating licenses, both of which we have covered in more detail in our documentation. You can then charge the customer extra for a license where they can to use your software on more machines at the same time.
We hope that gave you an answer to the question “What are different types of software licenses?” If you would like to read more about the licensing types, please read our documentation.
And if you are new to Cryptolens, welcome to our website! We offer a software licensing system for software developers to license and sell any type of software application. Our documentation pages give you detailed guides in your programming language on how to implement our licensing as a service (LaaS) platform.
In this blog, we explain the theory behind floating licenses in an offline setting in Cryptolens. For the actual code examples, please read the following documentation page on floating licenses. You can also check out our License Server repository on GitHub. Scroll down to the section called “Floating licenses offline” to find the most relevant information.
Alternatively, you can watch the full tutorial including more information about how everything works in theory on YouTube:
Floating licenses in theory
Say that you want to restrict licenses to a set number of machines. This can either be done with floating licenses or node-locking. Node-locking works in such a way that you restrict licenses to a number of machines, and if you want to activate a new machine to that license, you have to manually deactivate one of the existing machines.
For floating licenses, you instead have a requirement that only a certain number of machines can use the license simultaneously. This eliminates the need to activate and deactivate machines.
This is perfect if, for example, a customer downloads your application on 100 machines. You can then limit the number of machines so that only 10 developers can use your application at the same time. If the customer is anticipated to change machines very frequently, you no longer have the hassle of activating or deactivating machines every time a developer changes machines.
But how does this work? Your application continuously sends heartbeats to our API as it’s running, which tells Cryptolens that that particular machine is active. If Cryptolens does not receive a heartbeat from that machine anymore, it will automatically be deactivated. Naturally, a new machine can be activated again, as long as no more than a set number of machines are being used at the same time. This allows you to potentially charge the customer more for a license that allows for more machines to simultaneously be able to access your application.
The offline approach
With the offline approach, you can even use floating licenses when your application runs in a locked-in environment without access to the internet, such as a docker container. Instead of having to send requests to Cryptolens, you can have your application send the requests to a local license server. In this way, your application can run in, for example, a docker container without encountering any licensing issues.
We have now covered the basics of floating licenses in an offline setting in Cryptolens. If you want to set up floating licenses, please read the documentation, or watch the YouTube video provided earlier in this blog.
Please let us know if you have any questions. Thank you for reading!
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