Licensing models
Every commercial licensing model in the industry decomposes into the same small set of building blocks: an entitlement, its policies, and (for usage models) metering. This page is the translation table — find the model you sell, see exactly what to configure.
Models compose freely: a node-locked subscription with a metered quota and a 14-day trial is one entitlement with three policies and a plan, not four products.
| Model | How MonetizeIt models it |
|---|---|
| Perpetual | An entitlement with no subscription period — the grant doesn’t expire. Scope it to a product version to sell upgrades as new entitlements. |
| Subscription | A subscription policy on the entitlement: period, renewal and expiry. Renewals fire Entitlement.Renewed; approaching expiry fires Entitlement.Expiring so your systems can act. |
| Trial | A trial policy: a time-boxed window with full or reduced features, convertible to paid. Entitlement.TrialExpiring drives your conversion outreach; support can restart a trial case-by-case. |
| Time-restricted | A time-restricted policy — valid only inside fixed start/end dates. Classroom terms, pilots, seasonal offers. |
| Named seats (per-user) | Fixed seat allocation: each activation consumes a seat bound to a user or device. With interactive-user activation, assignment to the signed-in user replaces code distribution entirely. |
| Floating (concurrent) | Floating seat allocation: N seats shared across any number of installs. Sessions check in and out; releasing a session frees the seat for the next user. |
| Node-locked | The device fingerprint binds the license to hardware. Component-based matching tolerates partial hardware changes without burning a seat; re-activation on a genuinely new device is a support action. |
| Metered (usage-based) | Metering: metrics with quotas per period, tier thresholds (Normal → Warning → Critical → OverUsage) and an enforcement policy per tier — warn, throttle or block. MeteredUsage.OverageStatusChanged tells your backend the moment a customer crosses a line. |
| Prepaid credits | A credit balance on a monitored asset: customers buy units up front, the application pre-allocates and commits against the balance, support tops it up. Overage becomes impossible rather than merely detected. |
| Offline / air-gapped | Offline activation: activation, usage upload and lease renewal travel as signed files. The license itself verifies on-device with no network. |
Choosing enforcement
Section titled “Choosing enforcement”Two distinct postures, often combined:
- Record and react — report usage, watch the tiers, handle overage commercially (upsell, invoice, notify). Frictionless for the user.
- Ask and block — pre-allocate before the action; the platform declines when the balance is exhausted. For costs you can’t absorb.
The metering guide covers both.
Where to go next
Section titled “Where to go next”- Selling one of these? Plans & pricing shows what the platform costs; use cases walk through complete scenarios.
- Building one of these? Start with the developer path — most models differ only in portal configuration, not integration code.