Concepts

Sealcord manages licences only; money moves at your payment provider. These are the words the docs, the Console and the API use.

Who

• Organization: Your team in Sealcord. It owns your products, your payment integrations and one plan. The Console calls it a workspace.
• Developer: A person who belongs to an organization, with a role in it: owner, admin, support or read-only.
• Customer: A person who bought your app and holds a licence for it.
• Display name: The name your organization shows customers on their licences, in place of its own name.
• Invitation: An offer to an email address to join your organization with a role, sent by an owner or an admin and accepted once, within 7 days, by that address.

Licensing

• Product: An app you license through Sealcord, with its own key prefix and signing key.
• Signing key: The Ed25519 key a product’s licence keys and verdicts are signed with. Sealcord generates it, keeps it encrypted and never shows it; your app embeds its public key.
• Licence: The right of one customer to use one product, within a limit, until it expires or is revoked.
• Previous public key: The public key of a product’s earlier signing key, kept after a rotation so licence keys signed with it still activate. Retiring it stops that.
• Licence key: The signed text a customer types into your app. It carries the licence’s terms, so your app can check it offline.
• Activation: One machine on which a licence is in use.
• Seat: A unit of a licence’s limit. A licence counts either seats (people) or machines.
• Verdict: A signed answer that a licence is active on a machine, which your app may trust offline until it expires.
• Active licence: A licence that is neither revoked nor expired.
• Licence state: Where a licence stands, as you filter and count it: active (and not a trial), trial, expired (by hand or past its expiry), or revoked. Each licence is in exactly one. The stored status your app receives is active, revoked or expired, and has no trial.
• Anonymised licence: A licence whose customer’s data was erased on your instruction: the address, reference and machine details are replaced, an active one is revoked, it can never be reinstated and it has no key. The row stays, so counts and history hold.
• Trial: An active licence with a trial end: issued by hand with an expiry, or from a payment provider’s subscription still in its trial, which converts it when paid. Your app sees an active licence.
• Licence term: How long a licence lasts: perpetual (no expiry), a term (until a date), or a subscription (while its provider subscription lasts).
• Issuing: Creating a new licence, whoever asks for it: your backend, the Console or a payment integration.
• External reference: Your own identifier for the sale behind a licence, such as an order id at your payment provider.

Selling your app

• Payment provider: A service that takes payment for your app, such as Polar (Stripe is coming).
• Provider account: Your own account at a payment provider; at Polar, a Polar organization.
• Payment integration: Your organization’s link to one provider account, made with that account’s own credentials, through which paid orders become licences.
• Product mapping: The rule that a given provider product grants a given Sealcord product, on given terms.
• Provider subscription: A customer’s recurring payment to you, held by the payment provider.
• Renewal link: Your own checkout at the payment provider where a customer buys a licence with an end again, shown on that customer’s licence.
• Customer portal: The payment provider’s pages where a customer sees and manages everything they bought from you. You choose whether your customers reach it from their licences.
• Webhook endpoint: Your own https URL that receives Sealcord’s webhooks about licence and machine changes, with its own signing secret.
• Delivery: One webhook’s passage, with its outcome and its attempts.

Paying for Sealcord

• Plan: What your organization pays Sealcord for: Free, Indie, Studio or Business.
• Plan limit: A plan’s number of active licences, products, team members, API keys, payment integrations or webhook endpoints. Passing it never stops existing licences.
• Grace period: The days an organization may stay over its active-licence limit before issuing pauses.
• Renewal hold: For 30 days after its subscription ends, a subscription licence keeps its place in your plan’s count, so a renewal never hits the limit.
• Issuing pause: The state in which an organization over its active-licence limit cannot issue new licences, while existing ones keep activating and checking.