What you get on day one
Three ways to license and meter software, compared on the things that decide whether you can ship. Each column describes an approach as it is usually sold and run.
| Criterion | Oclavex | Legacy licensing platforms | Home-grown |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time to first license | Yes: Sign up with an email address and issue a code from the portal the same day. | Partly: Typically a demo call, a quote and an onboarding project first. | No: Weeks to months of build before the first customer. |
| Published pricing | Yes: $0 · $99 · $399 · from $999, on a page you can read now. | Partly: Usually available after a sales conversation. | No: Engineering time, ongoing. |
| Offline & air-gapped | Yes: In every plan. Signed files carry activation and usage across the gap. | Partly: Often tier-gated, a separate module, or a license server inside the customer’s network. | No: A second, harder project. |
| Licensing models | Yes: Eleven models that compose on one entitlement. | Yes: Broad, built around perpetual and node-locked first. | Partly: Whatever you built; each new model is a release. |
| Usage metering & credits | Yes: Tiers, a policy per tier, prepaid credits, settled on the server. | Partly: Frequently a separate product or an add-on. | Partly: Counters in your database; settlement and overage are yours. |
| What ships in your binary | Yes: A public key on the device. Secrets stay with the hosted license service. | Partly: A vendor runtime, sometimes a dongle driver. | Partly: Your own key handling. |
| Back office | Yes: Provision Portal, end-user portal, audit log, GDPR tooling. | Yes: Mature admin consoles. | No: Admin screens you build and support. |
| Integration | Yes: .NET, C/C++ and REST; signed webhooks. | Yes: Vendor SDKs across many languages. | Partly: Whatever you wrote. |
| Operations & compliance | Yes: Backups, key rotation and the GDPR register run by Oclavex. | Yes: Run by the vendor. | No: Run by you. |
| Try before you decide | Yes: Four live demos, and every feature free to evaluate. | Partly: A guided demo. | No: — |
The established platforms answered a thirty-year-old question: how to keep a perpetual license on one machine. Today the question is different: is the software used the way each customer licensed it? That means tiers, seats, metered quotas and credits. Enforcing those terms is a different job from copy protection.
Building it yourself works until the second pricing model, the first offline customer or the first audit. The whole Oclavex back office is scriptable: catalog, entitlements and activation codes sit behind one REST API. So replacing what you built is a migration script. Codes you issued elsewhere import and keep working as issued.
Where the established suites still win: a vendor’s own dongles, a wider software-asset-management suite, decades of accumulated edge cases, and procurement familiarity. For every other case, Oclavex is the platform built for how software is sold today.
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