LicenceR
Simple licensing, seriously enforced. Grace periods, not outages, when the network blinks.
Register your products, decide how each licence is metered, and issue it — directly, through a reseller, in bulk, or by card from a self-service shop. Every licence becomes a signed token that your application verifies offline, refreshed by calling home. Paid orders become invoices, delivered as compliant European e-invoices through your own account.
10Licence types
4Role-scoped portals
13Built-in reports
95.9%Line coverage, enforced
The problem
Licensing is where a product company quietly leaks money and goodwill.
The licence key generator is a script one engineer wrote and nobody else understands. Renewals are tracked in a spreadsheet, so some lapse silently while others are chased twice. The reseller e-mails for a key and waits until Tuesday. And when a customer's network hiccups, your software stops working — which costs more trust than the licence was worth.
01
A key script
Issuance depends on one person, one laptop and no audit trail.
02
Silent lapses
Renewal revenue lost because nothing warned anyone in time.
03
Resellers waiting
Every partner key is a support ticket against your team.
04
Brittle enforcement
A check that fails closed on a network blink turns your licensing into an outage.
The solution
The whole licence lifecycle, and the money behind it, in one system you own.
01
Enforcement that respects reality
Licences are signed tokens your application verifies offline, with a configurable grace period carried inside the token. A customer whose connection drops keeps working; a customer who stops paying does not.
02
Types are configuration
Ten licence types run on six enforcement strategies, decoupled by design — so how a product is metered is a setting per product, not a code change and not a release.
03
The channel serves itself
Resellers issue their own licences to their own customers in their own portal. Customers buy, renew and download in theirs. Your team stops being the bottleneck.
Why it's built this way
01
Offline-first enforcement
The token is signed with your organisation's own key and verifies against the public half with no network at all — which is what lets you sell into air-gapped, factory-floor and shipboard environments where a call-home licence check would disqualify you from the tender.
02
Call-home health as an early signal
The call-home health report lists licences that have gone quiet — paid-for software that stopped phoning home. That is a churn signal, a failed-deployment signal and a tampering signal, and it arrives before the renewal conversation rather than after it.
Capabilities
01Licence engine
- Ten licence models: perpetual, subscription, fixed period, volume, concurrent seats, site, trial, evaluation, not-for-resale and OEM
- Six enforcement strategies — none, fixed date, date from activation, usage count, concurrent seats and named seats — chosen independently of the licence type
- Per-product configuration: duration, grace days, seat and usage ceilings, metric label and unit, reset period, heartbeat interval, offline allowance
- Configurable key format, generated securely with ambiguous characters removed and checked for collision
- Key rotation on renewal: keep the key, rotate with a grace window, or rotate immediately
- Append-only audit trail covering thirteen event types: issue, activation, suspension, revocation, renewal, rotation and more
- Bulk issue up to 500 licences per batch, or import up to 5,000 rows from CSV, XML or JSON with a dry-run preview
02Call-home API & integration
- Validate at start-up, returning status, entitlements and a freshly signed token
- Heartbeat carrying usage delta and cumulative usage for metered licences
- Activate against a hardware fingerprint, hostname, operating system and application version; idempotent
- Rate limits per licence key: ten validations, twenty heartbeats and sixty activations per minute
- Signed webhooks to the customer on renewal and revocation
- Integration guide with client examples in Java, Python and Node, an API explorer, and copy-paste code in eleven languages
- Specification exportable as JSON, YAML or Markdown, plus an integration brief written for a coding agent
03Portals & self-service purchasing
- Four role-scoped portals — Organisation, Partner, Customer and Platform — covering issuance, billing, reporting and administration
- Eight roles arranged in a real hierarchy, enforced on essentially every endpoint
- Customers and resellers self-serve: browse, buy, renew and download their own licences and tokens
- Each organisation connects its own payment account; the platform holds no money and takes no cut
- Orders are baskets covering several licences, products and types under one payment and one invoice
- Exactly-once settlement between the payment webhook and the returning browser, under a lock
- Operator-raised orders for phone, purchase-order and bank-transfer sales, with a visible, retryable paid-but-unfulfilled state
04Invoicing & e-invoicing
- Every fulfilled order drafts an invoice automatically, whether or not e-invoicing is connected
- Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 documents delivered through the organisation's own account
- European VAT rules validated before sending: standard, zero, exempt, reverse charge, intra-community, export and out-of-scope
- Gapless invoice numbering under a row lock, with configurable prefix, year, month and padding
- Bill-to resolution across partner and customer defaults, frozen onto the order when raised
- Four export formats, with a sent invoice exporting its stored bytes unchanged
05Delivery, alerts & insight
- Built-in SFTP server with per-customer, per-product credentials and a file browser confined to each credential's own directory
- Product releases with version, notes, checksum and a generated manifest that signals an available upgrade
- Expiry warnings at 30, 14, 7 and 1 day, with de-duplication, plus grace and usage-threshold warnings
- Thirteen built-in reports: by product, type and customer, expiring and expired, renewals due, seat utilisation, call-home health and more
- Live log console with runtime log levels, and a health screen for memory, threads and caches
- Five outbound mail providers, resolved from the organisation's own configuration or a platform fallback
06Security & governance
- Eight roles in an enforced hierarchy, applied at essentially every endpoint
- AES-256-GCM at rest for signing keys, payment, e-invoicing and mail credentials, with start-up refusing to run without a key
- bcrypt passwords; single-use, purpose-scoped, fifteen-minute reset tokens with anti-enumeration
- Rate limiting on login and on every licence API operation, with forwarded addresses trusted only from declared proxies
- A dedicated security audit log, ninety-day retention, covering sign-in, licence rejection and access denial, hardened against log injection
- A strict content security policy with no inline scripting and no third-party origins, frame denial and strict transport security
■Java 21 on Spring Boot 4, with a native-image build profile
■PostgreSQL, 25 versioned migrations, 30 tables
■Server-rendered vanilla ES6 front end — no package manager, no Node in the build
■RSA key pair per organisation for signing; rotation retires rather than deletes keys
■One-command install: three containers, credentials generated on first start into a volume
■2,131 tests; enforced build floors of 95% line and 80% branch coverage
Industries
Who it works for
Independent software vendors
Any company shipping installable, on-premise or self-hosted software that needs entitlements enforced in an environment it does not control.
Engineering & simulation
CAD, CAM, analysis and simulation tools, where floating seats, node-locked activation and site licences are all first-class.
Industrial & machine control
Factory-floor software, where offline verification with a grace period is the condition for being allowed on the network at all.
Healthcare & laboratory
Instrument and analysis software in segregated networks, licensed per site or per instrument, with an audit trail for every entitlement change.
Vertical-market ERP
Sector-specific business software sold per module, where feature flags inside the signed token turn modules into entitlements.
OEM & embedded software
Software licensed into someone else's product, with a dedicated OEM licence type and billing addressed to the partner instead of the end customer.
Channel-led vendors
Resellers issue and manage their own licences in their own portal, under their own cap and with their own invoicing identity.
Metered & transaction pricing
Products priced by documents, transactions or API calls, with usage counted through the heartbeat, reset periods and an overage policy.
European vendors
Peppol e-invoicing, EN 16931 VAT categories, reverse charge and intra-community supply handled properly, with euro and 21 percent VAT as defaults.
Use cases
Example scenarios
01 · Industrial & machine control
Licensing machine software on networks that never reach the internet
- Challenge
- A vendor of machine-control software sells into factories whose production networks are closed off. A call-home licence check is not allowed, so licence files are e-mailed by hand and nobody can say which site runs which version under which rights.
- Approach
- Licences are issued as signed tokens that the software verifies offline against the vendor's public key, with the grace period carried inside the token and activation tied to a hardware fingerprint. New releases are published with a checksum and manifest and delivered through the built-in SFTP server with per-customer credentials.
- Result
- The software is sold into isolated networks without weakening enforcement, and every issue, activation and renewal is recorded in the audit trail.
02 · Channel-led vendors
Resellers issue their own keys instead of opening support tickets
- Challenge
- A vendor selling through a dozen resellers generates every licence key itself from a script, on request by e-mail. Keys are tracked in a spreadsheet, and renewals depend on someone remembering them.
- Approach
- The existing keys are imported from CSV with a dry-run preview and keep their own key. Each reseller gets a role-scoped portal where it sees only its own customers and issues or bulk-issues licences under an enforced customer cap, while expiry warnings go out at thirty, fourteen, seven and one day.
- Result
- The vendor's team is no longer the bottleneck for every key, and each licence has a traceable history from issue to renewal.
03 · Metered & transaction pricing
Per-document pricing counted, capped and invoiced through Peppol
- Challenge
- A Belgian vendor of a document-processing product charges per processed document. Usage is collected from customers' own reports at the end of each period and invoices are typed up separately, so overage is noticed late or not at all.
- Approach
- A volume licence type is configured with a usage quota, a monthly reset period and an allow-and-notify overage policy, and the application reports usage with each heartbeat. Customers buy and renew in the shop through the vendor's own payment account, and every fulfilled order drafts an invoice that can be sent as Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 with VAT rules such as reverse charge validated before sending.
- Result
- Usage, entitlement and invoice come from one system, and customers approaching their quota are warned before the period ends rather than after.
Licence
Per deployment. Never per seat.
LicenceR is licensed per installation, with no per-activation fee. The annual fee follows a marginal schedule based on your own turnover, from a €900 minimum, with any yearly increase capped at 25%. Every tranche carries unlimited users, projects and organisations inside one tenant; hosting, hardware, consultancy, setup, migration and training are billed separately.
Annual licence by turnover, ex VAT
| Turnover | Per year |
|---|
| Up to €500k | €900 |
|---|
| €1M | €1,500 |
|---|
| €5M | €2,500 |
|---|
| €25M | €5,500 |
|---|
| €100M | €13,000 |
|---|
| €500M | €37,000 |
|---|
| €1B | €52,000 |
|---|
What it does
- 01Licences are signed tokens verified fully offline, with a configurable grace period — a network blink never becomes an outage.
- 02Resellers and customers issue, buy and manage their own licences in their own portals — your team stops being the bottleneck.
- 03Every fulfilled order drafts a compliant Peppol e-invoice automatically, through your own payment and invoicing account.
At a glance
CategoryLicensing Platform
LicencePer deployment, unlimited users, from €900 a year
For whomISVs · Engineering & Simulation Software · OEM & Channel Sales
Bring your licence book.
Export what you have today, however untidy. We will import it under its existing keys and show you the renewals you were about to miss.Start the conversation →