Easy Licensing Solution

[volkanozyilmaz]

Hi Guys,

I use my own licensing solution for Volko Audio. It's a web based system. I can create serials and distribute to the client (plugins) or website (volkoaudio.com). When a user buy a product, the system assigns a serial key to the user for a specific sku and when the user wants to reach the serial then the system sends the serial to the plugin or website.

I'm wondering, how many plugin developers would like to use that type of system for their plugins. The plugin developer won't install anything on the server side. My server will serve for every request. The developer only creates the products and the skus. After that create serials then use it. It's a API based system. On the client side, the developer just needs to call API endpoints.

If somebody interested it, I would like to know and I'm here to answer for all questions.

p.s. there is no protection system.

[stratum]

Greetings from Turkey. It's getting more crowded here than Istanbul. Nice website, I guess your company has been around for a few years and I didn't notice.

Going back to the question, I couldn't understand why a developer wouldn't instead use a well known system that also handles payment, like shareit.

[volkanozyilmaz]

Greetings from Turkey. It's getting more crowded here than Istanbul. Nice website, I guess your company has been around for a few years and I didn't notice.

Going back to the question, I couldn't understand why a developer wouldn't instead use a well known system that also handles payment, like shareit.

Thanks for your reply. Shareit is a full marketing system which has payment solution. My system is only for license distribution. If you use directly paypal, stripe etc.. you don't use shareit.

[stratum]

Hi

Something like this has two kinds of potential customers:

1) Hobbyists who distribute simple plugins and not realy serious about the business and want to make a few bucks only. There was a website called minimal system instruments (http://www.minimalsystem.com ) who used to do that, but it isn't active now. I guess they have tried it and haven't been successful.

2) More serious companies in need of a licensing system: For them the idea is easy to implement, they'll be able to write the whole thing from scratch in a few days or perhaps a week. In addition to the website they'll make, perhaps it's a one man-month job. Since implementation isn't difficult, in this case the idea would be marketable only if you can convince them that their data is safer at your hands than it would be at their own hands. That would be difficult to do, since they could store all their data in a cloud service like AWS, and AWS would handle backups.

[volkanozyilmaz]

Hi

Something like this has two kinds of potential customers:

1) Hobbyists who distribute simple plugins and not realy serious about the business and want to make a few bucks only. There was a website called minimal system instruments (http://www.minimalsystem.com ) who used to do that, but it isn't active now. I guess they have tried it and haven't been successful.

2) More serious companies in need of a licensing system: For them the idea is easy to implement, they'll be able to write the whole thing from scratch in a few days or perhaps a week. In addition to the website they'll make, perhaps it's a one man-month job. Since implementation isn't difficult, in this case the idea would be marketable only if you can convince them that their data is safer at your hands than it would be at their own hands. That would be difficult to do, since they could store all their data in a cloud service like AWS, and AWS would handle backups.

Good point. The problem is not in the implementation. The problem is maintaining the server and application. You need to test it too. You'll also pay for your servers and you always need to watch the servers too. There are so many responsibilities.

If you prefer to use my service, you don't worry any of them I listed. You just prepare your client and use it. There is no headache.

[stratum]

Actually there is some business case here, but it's not only more involved than you think but also quite boring, as a job. Those companies get many license transfer and upgrade requests and spend a lot of time answering those emails. They would naturally want to get rid of that mundane work if they actually believed that somebody else could do it professionally. Similarly they would like to get rid of support requests like 'the plugin does not work on DAW xyz version x". Answers to such questions are usually known, such as telling the customer "enable gpu acceleration from the options menu". Usually the customer gets poor service, and their emails are not answered for several days. Maintaining the server and the application is not a problem. Install once and they'll run forever, and just get regular backups.

[JCJR]

I do not know how big a market. Maybe there could be a demand, dunno.

The company I worked with, I experimented with it a few times over the years, but our specs included "not entirely ineffective copy protection" plus friendly enough to the user to retain paying customer goodwill. A sizeable fraction of income was customers who would upgrade near annually. Which made it, at least to me a harder problem.

Over the years there were some small developers offering not real expensive web based systems for license. We made a few abortive tests without finding something both user friendly and company friendly while also being not trivially easy to hack.

About when I retired they finally found a product which seemed to work good enough so far as I know. Can't recall details. I think my buddies had to modify the system to get what was desired.

The company hired primary web services from a local company with a fairly big server farm. My employer hired apache servers for web and such. I think at least one was a dedicated machine, plus various virtual servers. The company also hired one or two dedicated windows servers which were used for media streaming and maybe other tasks.

So none of our programmers were in any way unix literate. My tests were web apps running on a windows server at the server farm. With the plan of dedicating a windows server if something workable might be discovered.

Everything is learnable but what little I knew about writing mac and pc music apps did not overlap much with writing web apps hosted on a windows server. To a beginner, little things like convincing the server to run an app seemed rather arcane involving numerous server settings pages. It seemed to need an entirely different kind of nerd to do it right. That kind of web nerd might not have ever needed to learn much about programming midi/audio apps.

Windows server and web apps was a big enough learning curve that maybe it would be a much bigger curve on a unix server, for a fella starting out essentially unix-illiterate.

Another factor for small-budget operations-- I don't know the prevalence, but my hobby website that time forgot has big bandwidth and storage and very low annual price. A virtual apache server last time I looked. That ISP company offers a long list of various free pre-configured tools which a user can choose to install. However the virtual server is locked out from running anything except that long list of typical common forum, photo, wordpress type apps.

Maybe that is common for inexpensive virtual servers? The ISP admins probably don't want to have to constantly repair damage done by thousands of idiots, each idiot paying only a couple hundred bucks per year for his virtual server.

I'm just saying, mabe low budget guys would have to spend too much money to get a 24/7 decent bandwidth server, which is also user-programmable. Even if the fella happens to know or be willing to learn how to program his server.

Apologies drifting. Just saying, maybe there is money in it somewhere if the correct angle could be discovered.

[volkanozyilmaz]

I want to update this thread with the new news.

Now, Keyzy server is working with new updates. I would like to put the features here:

* Products: You can create products.
* SKUs: The SKU feature allows you to control your bundles and you can create SKUs for a combination of products. The same products can also be attached to a variety of SKUs. When you provide a serial number to a user, this serial number will be able to activate many products.
* Dealers: You can track your dealers by using serial numbers. You can also track the activations of their users.
* Activations: You can track all the activations of your users.
* Maximum Host Number: You can limit the number of times that a user activates a product on different devices. For example, if you limit your product activation to three devices, it will return an error message, if activated on a fourth.

In the client side, you just need to call one end-point. It returns OK or an Error message that you can let the user use your plugin or not.

[volkanozyilmaz]

I do not know how big a market. Maybe there could be a demand, dunno.

The company I worked with, I experimented with it a few times over the years, but our specs included "not entirely ineffective copy protection" plus friendly enough to the user to retain paying customer goodwill. A sizeable fraction of income was customers who would upgrade near annually. Which made it, at least to me a harder problem.

Over the years there were some small developers offering not real expensive web based systems for license. We made a few abortive tests without finding something both user friendly and company friendly while also being not trivially easy to hack.

About when I retired they finally found a product which seemed to work good enough so far as I know. Can't recall details. I think my buddies had to modify the system to get what was desired.

The company hired primary web services from a local company with a fairly big server farm. My employer hired apache servers for web and such. I think at least one was a dedicated machine, plus various virtual servers. The company also hired one or two dedicated windows servers which were used for media streaming and maybe other tasks.

So none of our programmers were in any way unix literate. My tests were web apps running on a windows server at the server farm. With the plan of dedicating a windows server if something workable might be discovered.

Everything is learnable but what little I knew about writing mac and pc music apps did not overlap much with writing web apps hosted on a windows server. To a beginner, little things like convincing the server to run an app seemed rather arcane involving numerous server settings pages. It seemed to need an entirely different kind of nerd to do it right. That kind of web nerd might not have ever needed to learn much about programming midi/audio apps.

Windows server and web apps was a big enough learning curve that maybe it would be a much bigger curve on a unix server, for a fella starting out essentially unix-illiterate.

Another factor for small-budget operations-- I don't know the prevalence, but my hobby website that time forgot has big bandwidth and storage and very low annual price. A virtual apache server last time I looked. That ISP company offers a long list of various free pre-configured tools which a user can choose to install. However the virtual server is locked out from running anything except that long list of typical common forum, photo, wordpress type apps.

Maybe that is common for inexpensive virtual servers? The ISP admins probably don't want to have to constantly repair damage done by thousands of idiots, each idiot paying only a couple hundred bucks per year for his virtual server.

I'm just saying, mabe low budget guys would have to spend too much money to get a 24/7 decent bandwidth server, which is also user-programmable. Even if the fella happens to know or be willing to learn how to program his server.

Apologies drifting. Just saying, maybe there is money in it somewhere if the correct angle could be discovered.

Very sorry for the very late reply. When I read your post carefully, I see there are some problems with the server setup, manage part and easily managing serial number system. Keyzy is a very easy system and you don't need to manage and setup your server for it.

The price will be near to a server's monthly cost.

At the end:

* You won't pay a server monthly.
* You won't setup and manage your server.
* You won't develop your own in-house serial number application or buy an expensive software for it.
* You just use a very easy system with almost a server's monthly cost.

What do you think?

[volkanozyilmaz]

Hi Folks,

We have just published our marketing website. http://www.keyzy.io Painless Serial Number Manager please let me know your opinion in here or via http://www.keyzy.io.

Volkan

[volkanozyilmaz]

Hi All,

We’ve posted our first blog article. Please let me know your opinion.

https://www.keyzy.io/blog/announcing-keyzy/

[volkanozyilmaz]

Hi Guys,

I've published another blog post. I hope you're interested in it.

Should You Use Bonus Solutions

[quikquak]

This is the conclusion...

“If the bonus solution is not a basic element for your business, enjoy it! However, if your business requires a fundamental solution, don’t use a bonus solution for it. It’s always good to be able to take care of your future needs and to change any service easily when the need arises.”

...what does that mean, exactly?
Also,I tend to switch off whenever I hear that corporate word ‘Solution.’ Sorry.

[volkanozyilmaz]

Lovely Bundles Bundles are good for sales. Dealers like them just as customers do. The reason why dealers like them is that they can combine and sell related products, thus increasing their sales. Customers like them because they get a group of...

Lovely Bundles

[quikquak]

Do you think you're speaking to a bunch of green-horns?