Licensing
License keys, activation limits, heartbeats, updates and the business of selling plugins and themes from your own site.
15 articles, page 1 of 2
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Core Forms 4.7
One compact navigation across Forms, Submissions, Core Commerce and Settings, a Form Theme Customizer with four presets, portable JSON export and import for everything, a Customers workspace and a builder that works on a phone. Released July 27, 2026, with five patches through August 15, including the move of licensing and updates to gauravtiwari.org.
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Core Forms 4.6
Products & Licensing rebuilt as a WordPress-native workspace: searchable tables, product workspaces, release preflight checks, currency-to-gateway routing, a native checkout, seven blocks and shortcodes, a commerce REST API with WordPress 6.9 Abilities and safer customer access. Released July 22, 2026, with two patches through July 27.
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Easy Digital Downloads Alternatives (One Speaks EDD's Own API)
Which EDD alternative fits depends on what you sell. If it's one plugin with license keys, an EDD-compatible API means shipped clients keep working.
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Freemius Alternatives: What Keeping the 7% Actually Takes
At around 7%, Freemius costs a $100k plugin business about $7,000 a year. Here's what that fee actually buys — and what replacing each piece takes.
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Gumroad Alternatives for Selling Software and Digital Products
Gumroad's flat 10% takes $1,000 of every $10,000 you sell. When a 5% platform or your own Stripe checkout with license keys wins — and when Gumroad still does.
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How Software License Activation Works: Keys, Limits, Heartbeats
License activation is a handshake: your key, your site URL, a server counting slots. Here's how limits, heartbeats, and deactivation actually work.
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Lemon Squeezy Alternatives for WordPress Product Sellers
Lemon Squeezy takes 5% + 50¢ per sale as merchant of record. If you sell WordPress products, self-hosting checkout and licensing keeps that margin.
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Nulled Meaning: What Nulled Plugins Are and Why They're Risky
Nulled means a paid WordPress plugin or theme with license checks removed. Learn the GPL nuance, malware risk, update problem, and safer alternatives.
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How to Sell WordPress Plugins From Your Own Site
Five pieces sell WordPress plugins from your own site: checkout, license keys, updates, customer area, gateway. All five can run inside WordPress itself.
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How to Sell WordPress Themes Without a Marketplace
Marketplaces take a big cut and keep your customer emails. Here's the five-piece stack that sells themes from your own WordPress site instead.
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A Software License Manager You Can Self-Host on WordPress
A software license manager does four jobs — keys, activations, downloads, expiry. Here's how to self-host all four on WordPress instead of paying a SaaS cut.
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A Software Licensing API in the EDD Dialect: a Field Guide
The four endpoints every software licensing API needs — check, activate, deactivate, get_version — with curl examples in the EDD dialect Core Forms speaks.
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