Regular licence for subdomain of related content

I’m making a website for my family where I want to point different pages to a different subdomain. e.g name.surname.com Overall with a common domain surname.com. Do I need multiple licenses as it’s still one complete end product? All this is hosted on my own web server it’s actually just directory pointing.

But I prefer having multiple WP installations instead of one multisite install. Nothing is being sold.
separate installs in multiple directories help with easier organisation and changes.

I’ve found conflicting answers, hence need clarity:

Theme in question here is KALLYAS - Creative eCommerce Multi-Purpose WordPress Theme by hogash or https://kallyas.net/

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There is indeed a lot of conflicting information about this. We need to go through and clean up the forums a bit. :stuck_out_tongue: However, the terms of the regular license actually make this abundantly clear:

You are licensed to use the Item to create one single End Product for yourself or for one client (a “single application”), and the End Product can be distributed for Free.

Note that there is no mention of domain names in the license terms. This is because licenses have nothing to do with domain names; they are always about the end product.

If you have different subdomains that are all a part of the same end product, you are absolutely allowed to use one license for them all. You also do not need to use WordPress’ multisite mode - separate installations are fine, as long as they appear to be a part of the same end product. There is no legal clause or official guidance anywhere that conflicts with this information.

Unfortunately, some authors do not account for this in their licensing systems. If you run into trouble when activating the theme on multiple subdomains, you should reach out to the author for help. Themes have very strict guidelines on how keygates are implemented and they should absolutely accomodate you.

And as always, if you aren’t certain about which license your use case requires, you can open a Help ticket to get in touch with the experts. :slight_smile:

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Be really careful. If you create the sub domains on your server they each become a different installation. This is obvious as you install WordPress on each. Therefore each requires a licence.

Why don’t you want a multi site installation? I have two and while they work a little differently they are as easy to manage as separate domains. Indeed balancing the extra work e.g. updating some themes and plugins via ftp with the reduced work, updating WordPress, server settings e.g. pho and most themes and plugins once. I would say there is no extra work in total.

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Worth clarifying that licenses are not tied to installations legally - some authors only do this for tracking. A single license can be used on multiple installations, so long as they are the same end product (i.e. the end product is the website, not the WordPress installation).

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@baileyherbert you are right to say people should check. However, my experience is that authors, rightly, protect their IP and income by preventing mulitple installations. How can a piece of code possibly know what the end result is?