Team Licensing for Your App

Developers who only offer single-user licenses miss a straightforward source of revenue: small teams that need to license the same app for several people. This page covers how to add a team tier to your app — what it means for a team to share one license, how each member activates against it, and how the buyer manages their seats without a support ticket.

Why offer a team tier

When a team buys software, they want one purchase and one invoice. Asking five colleagues to each buy an individual license creates five separate checkouts, five separate receipts, and one awkward conversation about expense reimbursement. Organisations are accustomed to buying a tool as a unit, not as a collection of personal purchases.

A team tier satisfies this expectation: one transaction, one license, a seat count that covers the group. From your side, it raises the average order value significantly — a five-seat tier priced sensibly is worth more than one individual sale and requires the same integration work. From the buyer’s side, it matches the way organisations make purchasing decisions. Adding a team tier does not replace your individual plan; it sits alongside it and catches the purchases that individual pricing turns away.

One license, many installs

A team tier is a standard license carrying a higher seat count. The buyer completes one checkout and receives one key. That key’s activation limit determines how many of the team’s machines can run the app — a ten-seat tier is a key with an activationLimit of ten.

Each team member installs the app and enters the shared key. Every activation registers that device with the licensing server and counts against the limit. The first ten devices succeed; any attempt beyond ten is rejected until an existing device is deactivated. Members do not need separate accounts or individual purchases. There is one buyer and several users — the distinction matters for administration, not for the technical flow.

Every activation is recorded on the server, which is the source of truth for how many seats a license is using. The server issues a signed lease — a cryptographically signed document — to each activated device, and the app verifies that lease locally on every subsequent launch, so day-to-day license checks do not require a network call. Read more about how the seat mechanism works in seat-based licensing.

Who manages the team’s seats

The person who made the purchase is, in practice, the seat administrator. There is no separate admin console or per-user account system — administration happens through the customer portal, which lists every activated device on the license and offers a button to remove any of them.

Removing a device frees one activation slot immediately. If a team member leaves, or replaces their laptop, the buyer opens the portal, finds the old device, and deactivates it. The freed slot is available to the next person straight away, with no support request to you.

This is enough for a small team. The buyer knows their own team. They can see which device names are in the list and act on them without needing per-user labels or role-based access. For teams that outgrow this model — large organisations that want a dedicated purchasing workflow — that is the territory of volume licensing rather than a team tier.

Pricing a team tier

A practical starting point is a per-seat-equivalent price with a small bundle discount. If your individual plan is $30, a five-seat team tier might be $120 — four seats at full price and one effectively free. The buyer saves money compared to five separate purchases; you capture the revenue you would otherwise lose to key sharing.

Choose your tier sizes based on how your target buyers are structured. A tool aimed at small studios or agencies might offer a three-seat, a five-seat, and a ten-seat tier. A developer tool used by engineering teams might skip straight to a five-seat and a fifteen-seat option. You do not need many tiers — two or three team sizes alongside one individual plan covers most purchasing patterns.

Each tier size maps directly to an activationLimit in Keylight. The price and the seat count are the only things that differ between tiers; the license mechanism is identical.

Doing it with Keylight

Team licensing in Keylight is a license tier with a higher activation limit, sold through a single Stripe checkout. You create a team tier in your Keylight product, set the activation limit for that tier, and point your pricing page at the corresponding Stripe payment link. The Keylight server handles everything else: issuing the key, counting activations, rejecting requests that exceed the limit, and letting the buyer manage devices through the customer portal.

On each team member’s machine, your app calls the same SDK method it would for any license activation:

import KeylightSDK

// Activate a customer-entered key on this device
await licensing.activate(key: enteredKey)

switch licensing.state {
case .licensed:
    enablePaidFeatures()
case .invalid:
    // activationError carries the reason — e.g. activation limit reached
    showActivationError(licensing.activationError)
default:
    break
}

If the activation limit is already reached — the last seat was taken before this member tried — the server rejects the request and the SDK surfaces the reason through activationError, so the app can prompt the user to ask their administrator to free a slot or upgrade the license. For purchases that go beyond a small team, see volume licensing. Pricing starts at $19/month with a free tier to test the full flow before you go live.