licensing Enverido - Simpler Licensing

[Michael]

6 hours ago, timnboys said:

well I have to tell you that due to liking the idea of paying once and never again unless you need updates I am going to stay with WHMCS licensing addon(and possibly switch to blesta 4.0 license manager plugin if it is better hopefully than 3.x was)

but good luck with your business anyway.

Nothing has changed in 4.0 with the License Manager, so......

[mrrsm]

17 hours ago, timnboys said:

(and possibly switch to blesta 4.0 license manager plugin if it is better hopefully than 3.x was)

What was wrong with the version 3 of the Blesta license manager in your opinion?

 

On 9/13/2016 at 10:16 AM, cogative said:

Our other two plans are the "Start-up plan" priced at $20/month, and the "Business plan" priced at $50/month.

The prices seem a bit steep for what you appear to be offering (That is my opinion at least).

The "Start-up plan" seems to make the least amount of sense to me as the "Free" tier is essentially a trial.  If you need more then the trial you probably need/want unlimited if you are serious about licensing some software.

For $50/month I would need something that provides better service then what it would cost me to develop/buy/run this myself.  

I would estimate server cost being at most $20/month if I rented 4 $5/month Digital Ocean servers and load balanced them as well as a  $100 one time fee for the Blesta or WHMCS license plugin.  That is probably over estimating on server needs as 1 server will probably work for most people for a significant amount of time.

On top of that I don't see any privacy policy nor terms of service. What kind of up time are you guaranteeing?

Do you have api docs I can look at without signing up?

There are a lot of things I would want/need to evaluate before I would even bother signing up.

 

On the positive side, not having to manage the license server could be a great benefit to some people/companies.

You have to show the value you are bringing as if your service is down for any reason that could disrupt all of a companies licensees which would be VERY bad.

[Michael]

8 minutes ago, mrrsm said:

What was wrong with the version 3 of the Blesta license manager in your opinion?

From what I can tell he wants a license validator so you can see if a license is valid.

[Rocketz]

Just so i understand this.. he wants something that allows random people to enter a domain, and see if the license is valid for that domain? Is that the main feature missing from Blesta's licensing module vs this service? 

[timnboys]

3 hours ago, AnthonyL said:

Just so i understand this.. he wants something that allows random people to enter a domain, and see if the license is valid for that domain? Is that the main feature missing from Blesta's licensing module vs this service? 

well actually I already have a prototype built for blesta for the license verification portal I just need to test it.

[cogative]

5 hours ago, mrrsm said:

What was wrong with the version 3 of the Blesta license manager in your opinion?

 

The prices seem a bit steep for what you appear to be offering (That is my opinion at least).

The "Start-up plan" seems to make the least amount of sense to me as the "Free" tier is essentially a trial.  If you need more then the trial you probably need/want unlimited if you are serious about licensing some software.

For $50/month I would need something that provides better service then what it would cost me to develop/buy/run this myself.  

I would estimate server cost being at most $20/month if I rented 4 $5/month Digital Ocean servers and load balanced them as well as a  $100 one time fee for the Blesta or WHMCS license plugin.  That is probably over estimating on server needs as 1 server will probably work for most people for a significant amount of time.

On top of that I don't see any privacy policy nor terms of service. What kind of up time are you guaranteeing?

Do you have api docs I can look at without signing up?

There are a lot of things I would want/need to evaluate before I would even bother signing up.

 

On the positive side, not having to manage the license server could be a great benefit to some people/companies.

You have to show the value you are bringing as if your service is down for any reason that could disrupt all of a companies licensees which would be VERY bad.

Hi,

Sorry for the slightly delayed response. Busy evening!

Thanks for the feedback! We're very flexible on pricing at the moment and I'd love to hear your thoughts if you had any specific ideas on what you would find an acceptable price point. At the moment we picked a few rough figures and went with them and we'd definitely be willing to change these depending on what people are willing to pay. I'm definitely thinking of shifting the pricing down. We've also changed the free tier to include 10 licences, and the start-up plan to include 30 licences (slightly more than before) 

The start-up plan is really there for people testing the waters and/or on a very tight budget for a start-up project - an indy developer if you like. I agree if you are serious about licensing you will want to skip straight to the unlimited tier, but at the same time it doesn't hurt to have the option there. 

ToS and privacy policy are on the way in the next few days, I'll let you know when they are up and accept that you might be unwilling to sign up without them present - they are coming!

API docs are here: https://docs.cogative.com/display/ENVD/API - there's also some end-user documentation and I'm starting to write documentation for the PHP library as I write it. Let me know how you think they could be improved. 

There's been some talk of a licence verification portal type thing - this is something that could be pretty easily achieved with our API using the /lookup endpoint - if a few tweaks are made to the endpoint. Currently you provide a licence shortcode (this is essentially the licence key that the user enters), and you get a product ID and licence ID in return (these are both used to make API requests). With some very simple tweaking it could just as easily work so that if you provided an IP or domain name it returns a licence ID (if there is a licence with that domain/IP) or an error if no licence exists. This could then easily be dressed up with a pretty front-end to act as the portal itself.

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions and I look forward to your feedback on the API docs and also pricing. We'd love to hear anybody else's thoughts on either of these topics, too. 

Thanks again everybody! 

[timnboys]

2 hours ago, cogative said:

Hi,

Sorry for the slightly delayed response. Busy evening!

Thanks for the feedback! We're very flexible on pricing at the moment and I'd love to hear your thoughts if you had any specific ideas on what you would find an acceptable price point. At the moment we picked a few rough figures and went with them and we'd definitely be willing to change these depending on what people are willing to pay. I'm definitely thinking of shifting the pricing down. We've also changed the free tier to include 10 licences, and the start-up plan to include 30 licences (slightly more than before) 

The start-up plan is really there for people testing the waters and/or on a very tight budget for a start-up project - an indy developer if you like. I agree if you are serious about licensing you will want to skip straight to the unlimited tier, but at the same time it doesn't hurt to have the option there. 

ToS and privacy policy are on the way in the next few days, I'll let you know when they are up and accept that you might be unwilling to sign up without them present - they are coming!

API docs are here: https://docs.cogative.com/display/ENVD/API - there's also some end-user documentation and I'm starting to write documentation for the PHP library as I write it. Let me know how you think they could be improved. 

There's been some talk of a licence verification portal type thing - this is something that could be pretty easily achieved with our API using the /lookup endpoint - if a few tweaks are made to the endpoint. Currently you provide a licence shortcode (this is essentially the licence key that the user enters), and you get a product ID and licence ID in return (these are both used to make API requests). With some very simple tweaking it could just as easily work so that if you provided an IP or domain name it returns a licence ID (if there is a licence with that domain/IP) or an error if no licence exists. This could then easily be dressed up with a pretty front-end to act as the portal itself.

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions and I look forward to your feedback on the API docs and also pricing. We'd love to hear anybody else's thoughts on either of these topics, too. 

Thanks again everybody! 

nevermind I probably should just make my mind up before I decide to flip flop between licensing solutions lol

[cogative]

16 hours ago, mrrsm said:

You have to show the value you are bringing as if your service is down for any reason that could disrupt all of a companies licensees which would be VERY bad.

Sorry - not sure I addressed this point directly yesterday.

Now that our first sprint of development is over we're moving our infrastructure over from the VPS it currently resides on onto an AWS cluster. Not only will this cluster give us faster performance and greater up-time, it allows us to easily scale with any additional demand, as well as setup load-balancing, replication and DNS routing. Hopefully this helps with some of your concerns regarding up-time. As we grow we'll expand into different regions, but our infrastructure will initially reside in AWS' US-east data centre, as we predict the a large number of our customers will be US-based, and this region seems to provide the best performance.

While this will hopefully hopefully help quell your concerns from a networking standpoint, there is of course still the possibility of a bad code deployment botching the service. In an effort to reduce the likelihood of this happening we use a continuous integration system which means all of our code will be thoroughly tested before being deployed to production instances available to consumers. In addition to this, we'll deploy to our application servers in stages (eg: say there are 4 applications servers: app-1, app-2, app-3, and app-4 - we'll deploy the new codebase to app-1 first and monitor for any issues before deploying to app-2, then app-3 and then app-4. This means that if any unexpected issues do crop up with the new codebase, we can take that app server down and revert the changes while still having 3 others available to serve customers and API requests. 

If you're already familiar with software development I'm sorry if some of that sounded like an unnecessary explanation! However if you're not hopefully that will provide some reassurance as to the stability of the service.

[timnboys]

14 hours ago, cogative said:

Sorry - not sure I addressed this point directly yesterday.

Now that our first sprint of development is over we're moving our infrastructure over from the VPS it currently resides on onto an AWS cluster. Not only will this cluster give us faster performance and greater up-time, it allows us to easily scale with any additional demand, as well as setup load-balancing, replication and DNS routing. Hopefully this helps with some of your concerns regarding up-time. As we grow we'll expand into different regions, but our infrastructure will initially reside in AWS' US-east data centre, as we predict the a large number of our customers will be US-based, and this region seems to provide the best performance.

While this will hopefully hopefully help quell your concerns from a networking standpoint, there is of course still the possibility of a bad code deployment botching the service. In an effort to reduce the likelihood of this happening we use a continuous integration system which means all of our code will be thoroughly tested before being deployed to production instances available to consumers. In addition to this, we'll deploy to our application servers in stages (eg: say there are 4 applications servers: app-1, app-2, app-3, and app-4 - we'll deploy the new codebase to app-1 first and monitor for any issues before deploying to app-2, then app-3 and then app-4. This means that if any unexpected issues do crop up with the new codebase, we can take that app server down and revert the changes while still having 3 others available to serve customers and API requests. 

If you're already familiar with software development I'm sorry if some of that sounded like an unnecessary explanation! However if you're not hopefully that will provide some reassurance as to the stability of the service.

okay will it be possible soon to add the path verification option to the license as well? because I admit that is the only thing I am missing from whmcs & blesta's licensing addon's.

[cogative]

7 hours ago, timnboys said:

okay will it be possible soon to add the path verification option to the license as well? because I admit that is the only thing I am missing from whmcs & blesta's licensing addon's.

What do you mean by path verification, exactly?

[timnboys]

5 hours ago, cogative said:

What do you mean by path verification, exactly?

see here: http://docs.whmcs.com/Licensing_Addon

[cogative]

10 minutes ago, timnboys said:

see here: http://docs.whmcs.com/Licensing_Addon

https://dev.cogative.com/projects/ENV/issues/ENV-68

Added to our development tracker 

[EidolonHost]

Hmm. Interesting product along with a possible on-premises solution. Interesting.

I'd be happy to help with beta-testing this module on a development system. I'll sign up later at some point today and let you know when I do.

[cogative]

15 hours ago, Keiro said:

Hmm. Interesting product along with a possible on-premises solution. Interesting.

I'd be happy to help with beta-testing this module on a development system. I'll sign up later at some point today and let you know when I do.

Great to have you on-board! Feel free to drop me a PM if you need any help with anything. 

[Blesta Addons]

Nice platform , maybe when i get time i will integrate API to my digital product module to deliver product with licenses .

 

 

 

[cogative]

 

1 hour ago, naja7host said:

Nice platform , maybe when i get time i will integrate API to my digital product module to deliver product with licenses .

 

 

 

Thanks! Let me know if you have any feedback at all. 

[cogative]

Just a quick update for you guys. The PHP library is now at a point where it's very easy to activate and verify licences. Take a look at the library on GitHub, here: https://github.com/enverido/php

There's a link to the full documentation on the GitHub page, but for an example of how simple it is to verify a licence check out this page:
https://docs.cogative.com/display/ENVD/Verifier

[Paul]

52 minutes ago, cogative said:

There's a link to the full documentation on the GitHub page, but for an example of how simple it is to verify a licence check out this page:
https://docs.cogative.com/display/ENVD/Verifier

if($licenceValid) {
    echo("Yay! A valid licence!");
} else {
    echo("Arrgh! Hide the rum! Ye might be a pirate!");
}

LOL

Your code makes me happy.  

[Blesta Addons]

3 hours ago, cogative said:

Just a quick update for you guys. The PHP library is now at a point where it's very easy to activate and verify licences. Take a look at the library on GitHub, here: https://github.com/enverido/php

There's a link to the full documentation on the GitHub page, but for an example of how simple it is to verify a licence check out this page:
https://docs.cogative.com/display/ENVD/Verifier

i have almost finished my digital product pro version that has the licensing hook, i want to add your service to the my license choice . the 10 licenses limit is counting the canceled licenses  ?

 

 

[cogative]

2 hours ago, naja7host said:

i have almost finished my digital product pro version that has the licensing hook, i want to add your service to the my license choice . the 10 licenses limit is counting the canceled licenses  ?

The 10 licences limit includes suspended licences too (this is because these licences can be "unsuspended" and made active again, and it's difficult to predict whether or not your customer is going to decide to renew their licence to unsuspend it - if they did and the suspended licence didn't count towards your totals you could run into problems where an existing customer can't unsuspend a licence they've paid for.

From sometime later today (21st Sept. 2016) you'll also be able to delete licences. both via the API, the PHP library and also the enverido web UI. This will remove the licence and all of its data from the licence server, freeing up one item in your licence count. If you delete a licence, it can't be renewed like a suspended one can, and any products or 3rd party integrations using that licence will stop functioning correctly (eg: if the licence is provisioned in Blesta, and then you delete it via the API from your PC, Blesta will not have a good time). 

We're just carrying out the final tests to make sure everything works properly when deleting licences before we launch it onto the live servers - so like I said, expect it at some point later today. I can drop you a PM when the feature goes live, if you like?

[Blesta Addons]

@cogative perfect  .. this will help more in testing ... when i finish integration i will notice you .

[cogative]

@naja7host

Licences can now be removed via the web UI and the API. To remove via the web UI, simply click "Delete" to the right-hand side of the licence where it's listed under the "Licences" page. If you're logged in, click here to get to that page. 

To remove a licence via the API, take a look at our documentation, here. As usual, it's a pretty simple 1-call request that will return either a successful response with some information about the licence you just deleted, or it will return an error and error code if there was a problem (common problems would be that you forgot to add an API key to the request, you're trying to delete a licence that isn't yours, or the licence has already been deleted, or never existed in the first place).

Deleting a licence will be added into the PHP library shortly - If, for some reason, you need it in the next couple of hours, you can make an API request to delete the licence. Just instantiate a new "Api" class and then get the Guzzle HTTP client using the getClient() method. 

The default behaviour of our Blesta module is still to suspend a licence, even if the service is cancelled. We've done this for the sake of data integrity. If you want to change this behaviour, you can fork our Blesta module on GitHub and modify the module to delete a licence if the service is cancelled, instead.

Deleting a licence means that it will no longer be included in your total licence count. An easy rule to remember is that if the licence appears in the list under the "Licences" page, it will be counted as one of your licences - even if it's expired or has been suspended. If there's enough interest, we could add some tools which allow you to delete all the expired licences, or all of the suspended licences, in one fell-swoop, but that's a pretty risky move so I'm somewhat hesitant to add it initially, at least. 

Hope this helps! Let me know if you run into any issues. 

[Paul]

48 minutes ago, cogative said:

The default behaviour of our Blesta module is still to suspend a licence, even if the service is cancelled. We've done this for the sake of data integrity. If you want to change this behaviour, you can fork our Blesta module on GitHub and modify the module to delete a licence if the service is cancelled, instead.

Services that are cancelled in Blesta cannot be "un-cancelled", so it might make sense to cancel via the API unless I'm missing something.

[cogative]

4 minutes ago, Paul said:

Services that are cancelled in Blesta cannot be "un-cancelled", so it might make sense to cancel via the API unless I'm missing something.

Ah okay, that's interesting to know. I might change the default behaviour, then.

[cogative]

The PHP library has been updated, licences can now be created and deleted easily using the library. The latest changes are now on GitHub here: https://github.com/enverido/php, and as usual can be pulled into your project via Composer. 

There's no complete documentation for the PHP library yet, but to take a look at how to create and delete a licence via the library in the LicenceTest class, here: https://github.com/enverido/php/blob/master/tests/LicenceTest.php - essentially to create a licence you just need to make an API object using your API key and organisation name. Create a product object using the API object you just made and a product ID, and then create a licence by passing in the values required for the API call (which you can see here: https://docs.cogative.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=1409441#id-/licence-POST) - hopefully it's all fairly self explanatory.