Lictivate makes licensing and activation easier

If you ever looked for a solution to add license key and online activation support to your software product, you have probably found hundreds of tools. Most of them are powerful and feature rich, yet making it complex and expensive. So I decided to roll up the market a little by publishing my own solution. Lictivate

What's really amazing is how many tools claim to have best software protection, quickest integration and widest platform support. In my opinion, "protecting" your software is a waste of time. First, software that has been protected by a third party tool is easier to crack because the cracker only has to crack one software to crack all software protected by that protection tool. Second, the better the protection the more crackers may want to crack it - not because your software is so valuable but because cracking the protection gets the cracker reputation in the cracker's scene. And third, protecting your software is a costly action and will continue to cost you after it has been cracked. It'll end in a game of cat-and-mouse.

Lictivate does not protect your software from cracking but it manages license usage and simply integrates "activation" to lock a license down to the end user's hardware. Lictivate is a hosted service, so online activations run from our server lictivate.com. You (the developer) only have to register on www.lictivate.com, download the LictivateClient package, add a reference to LictivateClient in your .NET project, copy & paste some code, change some consts and you're done. The LictivateClient package contains full source code and a sample application to guide you through the integration very quickly.

Lictivate supports activations using the web service or by e-mail (phone & fax to come). It also supports "product editions" or "features" associated with a license key.

Pricing: You can try Lictivate with no commitment required. To go live after the trial, the monthly fee is $8.95 (or $94.95 per year). Compare that to the competitors.

Also, development on Lictivate continues. Next on the todo list is to put up a standalone Activation Server product, support phone and fax activations, integrate sales processing companies, create a ready-to-use DLL for non .NET developers and a lot more...