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Licensing

Eight.ly ships as one product, Eight.ly OS, with one license key system. Your license key activates your install and controls access to the App Store catalog and product updates.

What a license gates — and what it doesn't

A license gates two things: the App Store catalog and product updates. Nothing else.

  • An installed system never stops working. Whatever you installed keeps running end to end, indefinitely — including if you never activate.
  • An unlicensed, unactivated, or lapsed install still receives security fixes.
  • If the license server is unreachable — down, DNS gone, network cut — your server keeps running and every already-deployed app keeps working. You just can't fetch new App Store templates or product updates until connectivity is restored.

Trial vs. paid

A fresh install starts a 30-day trial.

  • During the trial, every feature works, App Store included.
  • When the trial ends, creating new things — apps, VMs, LXC containers, shares, backup jobs, stacks, clones, imports — needs an activated license.
  • A lapsed trial never touches: anything already running, your data, reading, the activation screen itself, or security fixes.
  • Once activated (paid), the trial lock never applies again — an activated install never locks, ever.

Activation

  1. Purchase a license at eight.ly/#pricing — you'll receive a license key by email
  2. Open Settings > License in the dashboard
  3. Paste the key (it's 24 characters in four groups, like ABCDEF-GHJKMN-PQRSTV-WXYZ12) and click Activate
  4. Once activated, the App Store catalog syncs automatically

The License page also shows your Install ID (share it with support if activation fails), when your included updates run out, when you activated, and the last successful check-in. Deactivate this install on the same page unbinds the license from this machine so you can activate it elsewhere — the license itself stays valid.

Privacy

The daily licence check-in sends the licence token and a hardware fingerprint (one-way hashes of the system ID, network card address and boot disk serial) so the licence stays tied to one machine. It sends no personal information and no usage data. The full list of what Eight.ly OS sends is on What Eight.ly OS sends.

Pricing

Buy once. A year of updates is included; extending updates afterward is optional. Lifetime is available. See pricing and what's included for current figures.

Transferring a license

Contact support to move a license to a new server. Licenses aren't hardware-locked — no USB dongle, no MAC address binding.