Our sister company, PDF Pro Software Inc was in need of a License Manager to provision, manage, and automate thousands of software licenses issued daily. After performing a thorough analysis of as many vendors we could find, we concluded that the smaller players lacked the sophistication necessary to meet our specific requirements, while the larger vendors proved cumbersome to use, while their pricing felt unjustifiably high. As a result, we sought a more suitable solution that struck the right balance between sophistication, usability, and fair pricing. We decided to build our own license server for our own needs.

mplementing our license server within the PDF Pro Application was a solid success, and made the service available to the world for free in order to collect feedback, and feedback there was! hundreds of solo developers and hobbyists jumped in and provided mountains of valuable feedback that we used to improve LicenseSpring.

The first externally paying customers started to flow in, and were primarily using LicenseSpring as a means of issuing time limited and node locked Borderlicenses for desktop applications that handled a high volume of licenses, with offline license checks. SDKs targetting C++, C#, and Java systems were made available to make it as easy as possible to add Licensing within our customer’s applications.

We extended our service’s capabilities to cater to a diverse range of customer requirements across various industries. We released Feature-based licensing, consumption-based licensing, custom fields, floating licensing, and single-sign-on support. Our clientele now spans across Life Sciences, Critical Infrastructure, Aerospace, VR/AR, Manufacturing, and more, enabling us to serve a broader spectrum of needs and industries.

We are currently hard at work maintaining and improving the LicenseSpring service, with an ever growing engineering team. This includes adding more functionality to our API, extending our portals, adding more native integrations, always emphasizing our security and compliance.