Self-Hosting vs SaaS: What Licensing Actually Needs to Enforce

A license system's job is to make unauthorized use inconvenient, not to make legitimate use painful. Machine-binding stops casual key sharing without requiring a permanent internet connection to validate on every launch.

A grace mode for localhost and staging environments matters more than it seems — developers need to build and test without fighting the license system, and a tool that blocks its own development environment gets uninstalled fast.

Revocation should be immediate and visible: a clear message explaining why access stopped, with a path to resolve it, converts far better than a silent failure that looks like a bug.