This model enables you to securely distribute trial versions of your product, which your customer can easily upgrade.

A trial license can either be time-limited (eg. 30 days) or not. When it's not time-limited, it can have a reduced set features (eg. lite version). Once the time limit is reached, it can either disable the entire application or just certain features.

The user can later upgrade the same license key to be able to get a full-featured version of the application.

Perpetual license tutorial

A subscription is when you give access to your product for a limited period of time.

Instead of offering your application as a 'product', you can offer it it as a 'service' (for example, your customers may get additional support together with the product during the subscription period).

This model is good because it provides you with a recurring revenue stream.

By supporting usage-based licenses, we can monetize a group of users that would otherwise not have purchased the product (eg. because it is too expensive).

Usage-based licensing is when you charge for usage of specific features. For example, if you have an accounting software, you can charge per created yearly report. If you have a movie editing software, you can charge per created movie (or for each conversion to a different movie format).

The point is to allow a larger group of people to be able to use your software. For example, let's return to the movie editing software. There can be two groups of users: those that will use the software a lot (eg. professional use), in which case they will prefer a subscription or a perpetual license. Another group can have movie editing as a hobby, in which case they may create very few movies, so a subscription may be to expensive.

Floating licenses restrict the number of users that can use the app at the same time.

For example, imagine you want your customers to be able to use your application on 10 devices at once. That is, they may have the software installed on 100 devices, but they can only use it on 10 of them at the same time.

Software Development Kit (SDK) licensing is when you distribute a component, usually a library, that is later going to be integrated as a part of another commercial solution.

User account based licensing replaces license keys with username/password authentication (and optionally with 2FA). A secure protocol, open-source, protocol is used to authenticatate users in the app, with them having to expose their username/password to the app. You can read more about the protocol here.

Cryptolens can be thought of as a toolbox for developers that simplifies implementation of a big variety of licensing scenarios.