Overview

TrialKey Licensing for Developers

What Is TrialKey?

TrialKey is a licensing system that helps developers of web sites and software to manage the process of licensing and managing users for their applications and services.

For instance, you might be the developer of an app and would like to allow people to sign up for a free trial to use your app for 14 days, and then ask them to purchase a license after that. TrialKey helps you do that easily.

Another common scenario would be where a developer has downloadable software that they would like to provide a license key to licensed users once they have paid that allows them to use their software.

TrialKey licensing is based on the simple concept of using a user name and password along with a unique installation key checked against a server to allow an application to be licensed with a zero installation footprint on the client. By cultivating a zero client footprint, we can ensure that the API can be used in approximately the same way regardless of the development language/environment with no extra dependencies for your application. This means the same methodology is used to license a web site, a mobile app, as well as installed downloadable software.

Our goal is to require as few API calls as possible for the largest cross-section of application types. We aim to make it virtually self-explanatory to use our API so a developer can get an application up and running with TrialKey quickly.

TrialKey goes one step further - we provide a quick and simple way to get your users signed up using pre-built screens called Quick Links. These are essentially pages that are pre-built and customized with your branding that allow you to have users perform common actions such as sign up for a trial, change their password, etc. This means getting a new user set up with a trial license is as easy as pointing them to your branded sign up screen (including email identity confirmation). Of course, you can always use the API instead if you want to build your own workflows.

Putting it all together means faster setup with less work and more functionality, out of the box.

Feeling like an eager beaver? Jump in to the quick start docs and get making your first request:

Dive a little deeper and start exploring our API reference to get an idea of everything that's possible with the API:

API Reference