License key for my script

[RedyMotion]

Hey guys,

So basically I recently started coding a script and now it's done. The only thing missing is a license key verification, is there any way I can do that? I was going to use Payhip's license key generator ( Payhip = site where you can buy/sell stuff, link : https://help.payhip.com/article/114-software-license-keys )

But if you guys a have a way not working with Payhip I'd really appreciate too!

Thanks in advance,
RedyMotion

[Mylenium]

Not sure what you really need. Clearly with the AE market being limited you wouldn't want to go out of your way to implement a full asymmetrial encryption yourself or any such thing. Sounds like you already have found a pretty acceptable solution. Otherwise you can of course implement your own algorithms in whatever way you fancy, but there are simply limitations how you can protect scrip-based stuff even with the currently defunct ZXP packages.

Mylenium

[ShiveringCactus]

It might be worth taking a look at https://aescripts.com/

There's a huge amount of plugins on there and I'd imagine they have advice for plugin developers.  If you sold through them, I imagine they take a cut, but you'd not have the transaction hassle to manage either.

Note:

I'm saying all this... having never written a script or attempted to sell a plugin.

[Mathias Moehl]

As @ShiveringCactus suspects correctly: If you sell your script on aescripts.com, they can use their licensing system. However, aescripts has very high quality standards and only publishes the best scripts. If they accept you, this is definitely the best option (Developing and selling scripts is my full time job and I collaborate for this with aescripts since 10 years).

[RedyMotion]

Hey so,

I can't really sell it on aescripts since my scrips only applys to a really small comunity of people. Is there a way I can make my own licensing system? Like by calling https or something like that...

Thanks!

[Mathias Moehl]

Then it is really up to you to invent something that works for you. In general, I think you have two options:

1) A system that phones home to ask if a license is valid (using the socket object of ExtendScript or by calling command line tools from the script which access a server in the internet).

2) you invent some logic to generate keys and to check if a key is valid and implement the checker locally in the script.

You also need to come up with ideas to make it difficult to remove or reverse engineer the license check from your code.

I've been involved in the development of the aescripts licensing system and such a project can easily be a full time project for many months. So don't expect a quick and easy solution.