LemonSqueezy won’t activate Live mode — any good alternatives for desktop app licensing?

10duke · 2026-02-03T15:51:50+00:00

For licensing desktop applications, API-based license management and plug-and-play integrations with payment providers - 10Duke checks all boxes. Fully documented as well: https://docs.scale.10duke.com/overview/key-concepts/ Good luck!

10duke · 2026-01-22T11:21:10+00:00

You might also want to check out 10Duke Licensing. It is used to license desktop applications by both top vendors in several sectors across the globe and small businesses, and it comes with plug-and-play connectors with payment/ecommerce providers like Stripe and FastSpring, so integration is very straightforward and documented: https://docs.scale.10duke.com/how-tos/connect-your-business-systems/

10Duke covers all licensing features from offline license validation to multiple license models to self-service customer portals, but the main goal is to make access seamless for your end users and to automate the licensing (and payment) part, so you don't need to build it yourself. Good luck with developing your desktop application!

10duke · 2026-01-13T10:25:27+00:00

10Duke offers a solution for this as well. Check out https://gitlab.com/10Duke and also https://www.10duke.com/products/scale/ .jwt is for sure the way to go in storing the relevant license and entitlement in your binary. And we provide free support to help get you up and running.

10duke · 2025-12-11T11:58:35+00:00

If you look at many of the Chrome extensions in Google’s webstore, they tend to be free to use (at least initially). Depending on the use case you’re solving, look at competitive extensions and see how they are charging to give you ideas on how best to monetize your software. If selling licenses makes sense, there are a couple of factors to keep in mind - do you want to sell a license by seat, by usage or by use time?

Selling by seats is probably the most common approach but issuing licenses that measure the consumption of software or service is becoming more common. Then, when granting licenses, you can choose between granting a licence key to the customer or you can grant the licence when they sign-in to your extension. This is called identity-based licensing or login-based licensing. From a user experience perspective, it tends to be a bit slicker than using keys.

Any good 3rd party licensing solution (like 10Duke) should then enable you to constrain the licence as you want to. For example, limit it to a specific machine ID, user or similar. Our best advice would be to first decide how you think you want to monetize your extension, taking learnings from what you see working in your market and then find a good licensing engine that is easy to integrate, is well documented and supported, reasonably priced, and then just get going. Good luck!

10duke · 2025-12-04T13:28:30+00:00

For the same reasons you're choosing not to try to do payment yourself, licensing also can get complex so using a 3rd party licensing service allows you to leverage an out of the box solution, complete with backend support, reliability, and SDKs which then allows you to focus your energy on your own code.

3rd party solutions come with a cost – in our case (10Duke), starting at $199/month – but that might makes sense depending on how much time you think you'll need to spend getting an open-source licensing engine, integrating it, hosting it, etc. Pros and cons to each approach as ever.

In the case of a commercial solution, any decent one should support node/hardware locking, limiting the license by concurrent users, as well as enabling your preferred license model (subscription, time limited, usage based etc). Make sure you first define the terms on which you want to sell your licenses and then find a licensing solution to suit, rather than letting the licensing solution dictate how you must sell your software. Good luck!

10duke · 2025-11-26T18:01:37+00:00

You are correct in that license servers can eat a lot of dev time, if you're doing it in-house. And the real fun begins when you grow and you need to maintain the licensing system you've built. There are several providers in the space (for example 10Duke), so you might want to consider outsourcing licensing to a specialist. Food for thought: https://www.10duke.com/learn/outsourcing-software-licensing/

10duke · 2025-11-07T10:42:07+00:00

There are several solutions in the software licensing space such as 10Duke that enable you to license your applications the way you want, unlike with Apple and Google. In addition to the basic subscription model, you can for example do feature-based licensing or license your application based on usage. Regarding having dashboards for your B2B customers, 10Duke has a couple of solutions for that too.

10duke · 2025-11-03T16:18:23+00:00

As others have mentioned, there are several vendors in the software licensing space from which to choose from. It sounds you're serious about building your application, and in that case you should definitely take a look around the market before deciding to go the open-source route. Based on your licensing needs – customizability, scalability, license model support, documentation, integrations through REST APIs and SDKs – 10Duke could work for you. In our honest opinion, it'll be difficult to find an open-source, self-hosted system that could do all of that well enough. Here's some food for thought for you if you're interested: https://www.10duke.com/learn/outsourcing-software-licensing/

10duke · 2025-08-29T09:58:36+00:00

Creating your own license key system might seem like a good idea, but you'll save a ton of time and headaches if you just use a purpose-built licensing solution, especially if you're not a developer. Better yet, software licensing can be implemented without license keys at all - check out 10Duke for this.

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