Metered Licenses

What is a metered license?

A metered license is a license that has limited, metered access to a specific feature of an application. For example, you you may wish to "meter" the number of times a given feature of your software is used.

How do I implement a metered license?

To configure a metered license Policy, you can set the Policy's maximum usage limit. This value defines how many uses each license is allotted. Since a metered license is one of our more flexible licensing models, what constitutes "usage" is up to the implementor.

A license's uses can be incremented, by 1, or by a different bulk amount, using a license's increment usage actions. Similarly, a license's usage can be reset or decremented in accordance with your license requirements, e.g. every billing period.

A license's usage does not have an effect on its validation result, but once the license's usage limit is reached, subsequent usage increment requests will fail with an error code indicating that the limit has been exceeded.

For more complex metering, we recommend integrating Keygen with a third-party service such as Lago or m3ter for ingesting measurements.

Metering CPU core count

You can configure a Policy to enforce a maximum CPU core count for each license's machine activations. This is a great way to meter CPU-intensive applications, where you may want to segment licenses by CPU core count. CPU cores are counted as the sum of all CPU cores across a license's machine activations. Any machine activation that exceeds the license's CPU core limit will be rejected with a detailed API error.

Offline capability

Although we don't support offline metered licensing out of the box, by utilizing periodic license check-ins, a license's usage can be stored offline and synced with our licensing servers when an internet connection is available.