Recipes

Choosing the right license

A practical guide to picking the license that matches your product and protects your revenue.

Why your license choice matters

Your license is the legal and technical boundary between paying customers and everyone else. A weak license invites sharing, cracking, and chargebacks. A well-chosen license aligns enforcement with your business model — subscription, lifetime, hardware-locked, or floating seat.

License models at a glance

  • SubscriptionRecurring revenue

    Time-limited access with automatic expiry. Best for SaaS, ongoing updates, and predictable MRR.

  • LifetimeOne-time purchase

    Perpetual access with optional version gates. High upfront conversion, but requires strong HWID locking.

  • Hardware-lockedAnti-sharing

    Tied to a machine fingerprint. Prevents account sharing. Combine with a reset cooldown policy.

  • Floating / seatTeam licensing

    Concurrent usage caps. Ideal for B2B tools where a team buys N seats and shares them dynamically.

How Meridian enforces your choice

Meridian maps every license model to a hardened C++ loader with Ed25519-signed payloads, HWID binding, and offline grace caches. You configure the model in the dashboard; the loader enforces it at runtime — no extra code required.

Next step: Read the HWID binding recipe to lock your chosen license to real hardware.