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About customer licensing

Licensing codifies the agreements in the software contract between the vendor and the enterprise customer. It makes those agreements available to the application through a license server at installation and runtime.

Licensing is a cross-functional concern:

  • Sales teams need license entitlements integrated with CRM tools like Salesforce so that entitlements can be updated when contracts change.
  • Support teams need the license as a unique customer identifier to get visibility into entitlements and product usage.
  • Engineering teams need application logic that controls access to features based on entitlements, without requiring code changes each time a license agreement changes.

About customer records​

In the Replicated Vendor Portal, each licensed end customer has a customer record. The record includes the customer's license, which defines their entitlements, expiration date, release channel, and available installation methods. You can create and manage customer records in the Vendor Portal or with the Replicated CLI and Vendor API.

For more information, see Create and Manage Customers.

About custom license entitlements​

License agreements for enterprise software often include entitlements such as:

  • Expiration dates for trial or Proof-of-Concept licenses
  • Feature-based entitlements to control access to features available only under certain product plans
  • Usage-based entitlements to limit the number of instances, users, or nodes permitted
  • Application-specific entitlements, such as controlling which AI model images a customer can access

Define custom license fields in the Vendor Portal to represent these entitlements. The Replicated SDK provides an in-cluster API that your application queries at runtime to retrieve the customer's current entitlements.

For more information, see About Customers and Licensing.

Use license fields in custom metrics​

In most cases, vendors rely on the license agreement to enforce entitlements, as enterprise customers avoid violating a software contract. Rather than blocking usage in code, most vendors track usage that exceeds the contract and reconcile at renewal. The exception is expiration dates, which you can enforce directly and extend as needed.

Measuring usage surfaces data to both the vendor and the customer. For vendors, it helps identify opportunities to expand the agreement. For customers, understanding their own usage helps them stay within contractual limits.

For more information about custom metrics, see Configure Custom Metrics.

Use license fields in preflight checks​

Reference license field values in preflight check specifications to validate that the customer's environment meets their license requirements. For example, write a preflight check that verifies the node count does not exceed the customer's licensed limit.

For more information, see Define Preflight Checks.

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