An active license is defined as a license that is set in PHPAudit as active, pending or reissued. Expired and suspended licenses are not counted towards the license total. If you have a PHPAudit license which allows 250 active licenses, then you can have up to 250 licenses which are set as active, pending or reissued before you upgrade. See the question below for more examples. We also offer a free version of PHPAudit which can control up to 15 active licenses, click here for details.

Throughout these past few years PHPAudit has never been responsible for any licensing related problems at any of our users scripts. Some of our customers have 10,000's of licenses in PHPAudit and not once have any of them had any problems. With something as critical as licensing, you want to know that it will work without requiring constant fixes, updating or changes to make it work.

In May 2005 PHPAudit v2 was released, and is the only fully featured licensing system available on the market today which offers a full shopping cart, full invoicing abilities including TAX, a remote API to extend PHPAudit, and complete control over your licenses. Since 2003, PHPAudit has revolutionised the licensing of PHP scripts through industry first innovations and PHPAudit v2 continues this trend.

If we used a traditional option such as per client our customers would end up paying for users who either signup and never order, or signup for a trial license (time expiring) and never order. In most cases, you get a few people trying out a product before anyone orders and so you could end up in the situation where you have a client limit of 250 and you reach that limit because you have 50 clients who have purchased your product but a further 200 who have tried it out but never ordered.

Per License would result in similar problems, where you could end up with 200 trial licenses in PHPAudit and a further 50 licenses which were created as a result of someone purchasing your product. This would again force you to pay and upgrade to the next pricing tier simply because lots of people have tried out your software!

SolidPHP, Inc. believes in a fair pricing structure and we believe per active license does this. After careful consideration, the results of our end user survey and talking to a number of our clients we decided it was the best option for both us and - more importantly - our end users.

If you offer a free time-expiring trial, then the trial license will be active for a short period of time (e.g. 30 days) but after those 30 days it will no longer count towards your active license total. If for example you have a PHPAudit license allowing you 250 active licenses you could have 150 licenses as a result of people purchasing your software, a further 75 people using your trial right now and a further 700 expired trial licenses which still only gives a total of 225 active licenses. Only when you have 250 licenses active at any one time will you need to upgrade to the next tier. With a per client or per license structure youd end up paying for most if not all of those 700 expired trial licenses with per active license you dont!

We occasionally use the abbreviation PAL which stands for per active license. You will most commonly see this used on our forums by ourselves and sometimes by our users. We believe our licensing structure is very friendly for our users, and so we think PAL is a very fitting acronym!

For the purpose of these examples, our most popular product (PHPAudit 250) allowing up to 250 active licenses is used.

Once you are within 10 active licenses of your limit (e.g. 240 active licenses) then you will be alerted by numerous notices on your PHPAudit administration login and home page suggesting you upgrade to the next tier. Your end-users wont see any changes in the client area or order form.

If you reach 250 active licenses, the messages will change informing you that you've now reached your licenses limit. The order form and client area continue to work and again no notices are displayed there.

If you reach 251 active licenses (e.g. a user orders your product) then you will no longer be able to login to your PHPAudit administration panel. Your users will continue to be able to access the client area to pay invoices and download your product and users will be able to continue to order your product(s) through the order form.

We don't charge $1000's or even $100s - our licensing is simple and is based upon the needs of real businesses - our licenses have no limits on the number of products or users you can manage and are simply sold based on the number of active licenses you wish to have to allow both small and large companies to take advantage of PHPAudit. We are in business to change the industry and the world through constant innovation and use of technology.

PHPAudit v2 can license scripts in a variety of ways such as remote and local key based designs. The remote licensing design connects to your PHPAudit installation to validate a users license using sockets, cURL or the PHP fopen wrappers. Some people dislike the idea of remote licensing, and so the 'local key' option allows you to generate license keys for your users that are decrypted and verified within your own script, allowing you to license your script without any need for it to connect to another server. A unique feature of PHPAudit v2 is the ability to combine the local key and remote designs, whereby the script calls home to your server and validates the license, but if that isn't possible falls back on the local key and validates the license without any disruption to the end user. These numerous and flexible methods of license validation allow PHPAudit to work with the most basic or complex PHP scripts. Our customers have also ported the integration code to many other programming languages and technologies such as ASP, Perl and Flash.

This depends on your current license and whether you have a PHPAudit Lite of PHPAudit owned license. In all cases, you should contact us to arrange the upgrade and pay the relevant fee - no data will be lost and no re-installation is necessary. Note: While we try and process license upgrades within a couple of hours, they can take several hours or longer to process and so we recommend upgrading to the next tier prior to hitting your license limit and being locked out of your administration area.

If you are running PHPAudit Lite 15 (and only Lite 15) then to upgrade you simply need to order a PHPAudit Lite or PHPAudit license and replace your license key. This will instantly upgrade your installation.