Unlock

Start selling in an afternoon: create a product in Unlock, connect your payment processor, and drop a hosted checkout link on your site or inside your app. Set prices, regional taxes, trials, coupons, and one-time or recurring plans. When someone pays, a unique key and receipt are issued instantly, your webhook fires so you can provision access, and the buyer gets a branded email with install and activation steps. Non‑developers can do all of this from the dashboard; teams can script it with the API and CLI. If you already take payments elsewhere, forward events to Unlock to mint keys without changing your storefront.

Next, decide how access should work. Build entitlements by plan: seat counts, machine activations, feature flags, usage caps, and time limits with grace periods. Choose perpetual rights, term licenses, or metered access. Define offline allowances for air‑gapped users and enable self‑serve transfers or admin‑approved resets. Drop a tiny validation call in your app or use an SDK to verify keys on launch and periodically. The dashboard lets you revoke, rotate, and extend in bulk. Alerts can ping Slack or email when activations spike, payments fail, or a key shows suspicious behavior.

Shipping updates is straightforward. Upload builds by drag‑and‑drop or CI, tag a version, and write concise notes. Publish to channels such as stable, beta, or nightly, and roll out gradually to a percentage of users. Unlock hosts a clean release page your customers can bookmark, with diffed notes and download links gated by entitlement. For integrated delivery, point your app to the update feed for Electron, expose private feeds for Composer packages, serve Python wheels through a private index, and gate scoped modules for Node consumers. Customers on valid plans can fetch updates directly from their usual tooling.

After launch, keep the business tidy without extra systems. Generate invoices automatically, handle refunds and credits, and record VAT/GST so your accountant stops chasing spreadsheets. Build dunning and renewal reminders into your cadence, and let the customer portal manage card updates and license transfers. When you need to change the rules—raise seat limits, add a feature flag, or adjust terms—edit the policy and apply it to a cohort without breaking existing installs. Typical flows include: a solo dev shipping a paid desktop app with auto‑updates; an agency distributing private libraries to clients by seat; a data‑science team pushing Python tools internally; or a plugin author gating NPM access for teams. Whatever your stack, Unlock keeps selling, licensing, and updates in one place so you can keep writing code.