Activation limits
Understand per-license seats, monthly activation usage, and same-device reactivation.
Seats and monthly activation usage
A per-license seat limit controls a particular key. The activation pool is your account's allowance for qualifying new activations during the billing period. Creating a product or generating keys does not consume the pool.
| Action | Key seat count | Monthly pool |
|---|---|---|
| Validate a key | No change | No change; API rate limits still apply |
| New live activation | Consumes one available seat | Consumes one entry |
| Same-device node-locked reactivation | Reuses the existing seat | No new entry, including when the pool is full |
| Repeated count-based activation | Consumes another seat each time | Consumes another entry |
| Sandbox license activation | Subject to the license's behavior and limits | Excluded from billable usage |
Recommended application flow
- On a new installation, activate with the license key and a stable device ID.
- Record successful registration locally to avoid accidental repeat registration.
- On later launches, validate the license and check product/feature entitlement.
- For offline use, verify a signed token; a local flag is not a license decision.
Node-locked versus count-based
Node-locked licenses recognize an existing device ID and reuse its seat. If a reinstall loses the SDK's persisted seed or changes the fingerprint, it is a new device. Count-based licenses do not deduplicate by device: repeated activation requests can consume more seats even on the same machine.
Read your usage
The admin top bar and Billing page show pool usage. The license list shows that key's currentActivations / maxActivations. A new billing period resets the period allowance; it does not clear the devices already registered to your licenses.
When a limit is reached
A rejected new activation returns HTTP 200 with isValid: false. SeatsExhausted means the key is full; PoolExhausted means the tenant allowance is exhausted. Same-device node-locked reactivation is exempt from those capacity checks because it adds no seat.
For a seat problem, remove a no-longer-used device where supported or increase that key's seat limit. For a pool problem, review Billing for available capacity and renewal. Validation does not consume the pool and continues subject to the license's normal validity and subscription rules.
Capacity planning
A 1,000-activation allowance supports roughly 1,000 new one-device installations or 500 new two-device customers per period. Existing installations that only validate do not use it. Reinstalls with changed device IDs, count-based retries, and additional machines can change that estimate.
Plan limits, current usage, upgrades, and subscription status are shown in Billing. See pricing for current plan allowances. Rate limits are separate from activation capacity; an unused pool does not prevent HTTP 429.
Subscription changes
Running out of pool capacity and a lapsed vendor subscription are different cases. A subscription lapse can produce vendorWarning and later a validation rejection. Surface the warning and resolve the subscription from Billing. Downgrading does not itself erase licenses, but retention rules and erasure requests still apply.