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Questions.. Is this a white-label service, in that any URLs used within product can point to our own domains? Regarding product lock-in: 1) Are future pricin

Questions.. Is this a white-label service, in that any URLs used within product can point to our own domains? Regarding product lock-in: 1) Are future pricing changes tied to specific already-released versions of products? Example: Customer installs version 1.5 of software. Licenses are validated every week or two. Service pricing changes, vendor comes up with some other solution but it takes 3-6 months for customers to move from 1.5 to the new 1.6 version of product without Keygen in it. Does the software vendor then have a choice between breaking license checks for existing installed customers or paying the arbitrary rate increase until they can get all customers updated? 2) Assuming vendor can whitelabel and provide their own URLs (maintaining control of them), if a transition off of Keygen is necessary, would you have any issue with your former customers (vendors) using an API mock that provides identical response to avoid breaking their own existing customer installs? Example: whitelabel license check API goes to vendor website, who passes through to Keygen and returns response back to software. Vendor stops using Keygen, replaces the pass-through to provide an API mock. Existing software license checks continue to validate without requiring a software update to prevent the license check from failing.

ezekg 9y ago
Thanks for the questions! So I'm currently working on making both the licensing and distribution APIs support whitelabeling via a CNAME DNS record, but at the moment, no, it's not supported. You can set up a proxy server in front of either API with your own domain (similar to how you would integrate e.g. AWS S3 behind your own domain using their API), but that's about it for now. And for your other questions: 1) I'm not sure I'm understanding you 100%, sorry. But it seems like you're asking about pricing changes for Keygen itself? I don't plan on hiking up prices on customers without due notice (even then, all past pricing changes have grandfathered in current customers' plans), and if they decided to part ways with Keygen because of a pricing change (e.g., maybe their volume doubled and I ask them to upgrade to a larger plan to support the additional traffic) I'd be more than happy to help them with a transition plan so that their customers don't suffer, but that would of course be on a case-by-case basis. Is that what you meant? 2) No, I don't think I would have an issue with a vendor mocking my API endpoints to make sure their software continues to function. Better yet, they could purchase an on-premise install and run the APIs themselves via Docker, and even purchase an additional license to modify the on-premise server's code to meet their needs. Vendor lock-in sucks, so thanks for asking these questions. I'd be happy to hear suggestions you may have on how I could better deal with the vendor lock-in fears a lot of companies seem to have when integrating third-party APIs (understandably so).
- heroprotagonist 9y ago
  Thanks. For 1, yes, it was mainly about pricing changes. Once you're embedded in software it's pretty much a commitment for the lifetime of that version of the product, at least. If upgrade cycle is, say, 6 months, then month-by-month pricing has potential to turn into a hostage situation. EG, plan can change from $200 to $2000 per month and vendors are forced to either accept it until their customers upgrade, break installs, or come up with some other solution. But, I think from the other responses, this is an avoidable scenario. Thanks for the information.

ezekg 9y ago

Thanks for the questions! So I'm currently working on making both the licensing and distribution APIs support whitelabeling via a CNAME DNS record, but at the moment, no, it's not supported. You can set up a proxy server in front of either API with your own domain (similar to how you would integrate e.g. AWS S3 behind your own domain using their API), but that's about it for now. And for your other questions: 1) I'm not sure I'm understanding you 100%, sorry. But it seems like you're asking about pricing changes for Keygen itself? I don't plan on hiking up prices on customers without due notice (even then, all past pricing changes have grandfathered in current customers' plans), and if they decided to part ways with Keygen because of a pricing change (e.g., maybe their volume doubled and I ask them to upgrade to a larger plan to support the additional traffic) I'd be more than happy to help them with a transition plan so that their customers don't suffer, but that would of course be on a case-by-case basis. Is that what you meant? 2) No, I don't think I would have an issue with a vendor mocking my API endpoints to make sure their software continues to function. Better yet, they could purchase an on-premise install and run the APIs themselves via Docker, and even purchase an additional license to modify the on-premise server's code to meet their needs. Vendor lock-in sucks, so thanks for asking these questions. I'd be happy to hear suggestions you may have on how I could better deal with the vendor lock-in fears a lot of companies seem to have when integrating third-party APIs (understandably so).

heroprotagonist 9y ago
Thanks. For 1, yes, it was mainly about pricing changes. Once you're embedded in software it's pretty much a commitment for the lifetime of that version of the product, at least. If upgrade cycle is, say, 6 months, then month-by-month pricing has potential to turn into a hostage situation. EG, plan can change from $200 to $2000 per month and vendors are forced to either accept it until their customers upgrade, break installs, or come up with some other solution. But, I think from the other responses, this is an avoidable scenario. Thanks for the information.