Licensing models
The common licensing models all decompose 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 and see 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 Oclavex 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 consuming a seat; re-activation on a 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 when a customer crosses a line. |
| Prepaid credits | A credit balance on a monitored asset: customers buy units up front, each commit draws the balance down, support tops it up. A commit that would go past an empty balance is refused, not merely recorded. |
| 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 approaches, often combined:
- Record and react — report usage, watch the tiers, handle overage commercially (upsell, invoice, notify). The user is never interrupted.
- Ask and block — commit before the action, and don’t start it if the platform declines. You can ask first to fail early, but the commit is the answer that binds. 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? Oclavex Plans shows what each plan includes; 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.