Staging and development environments vs Envato's current licensing terms

Hey all,

I wanted to bring up a real issue with licenses for items such as WordPress themes where according to Envato’s terms we cannot use the license on any permanent installations unless additional licenses are purchased and applied.

I find this ironic because as developers and designers we need usage to be fully available on development and staging environments far more than production.

Am I missing something about workflow and licensing?

Hi

You have to buy a new license for each single application. A single application means one unique end product (which can be copied and made available to end users of that product). So, when you will purchase any Item you will get a license(purchase code) for that Item. You can use that license(purchase code) for your production final application, in this case no additional licenses required.

If you want to use the Item in develoment step then you can try to use that Item withour license registration. If you need to register license for getting full features then please check Item documentation is there any help article about how to deregister form development environment and register production environment.

Also you can contact your purchased Item Author. Contact Author and let them know.

Thanks

1 Like

Hey Mgscoder,

Nice description of the issue at hand. Most WP themes I’ve purchased did need license keys to enable its features and seems to be permanently registered to the initial domain (not interchangeable). This license system basically voids development in secondary environments or at least makes it extremely difficult.

If you check documentation it is typically explained that “Envato’s licensing requires multiple licenses, one license per environment.”

Obviously we are not going to purchase 3 licenses for local/dev, staging and production environments per project yet this is the standard professional development setup.

I propose that all licenses function on any localhost environment and that each license can be registered on one (fixed) primary production and one (fixed) secondary staging environment.

Hi

there are many themes which have deregister and register features. So that customer can use the theme in develoemnt process and when all development done then can deregister the theme from development environment and can register for the productions. But if any theme not have this features then just a bad luck. Each Item license for each application it’s fine and I think no need to give permission for more than 1 environment at the same time. So, for using the theme for development environment then production environment just need to add deregister and register features of the theme and it is theme Author responsibility.

Thanks

I have not come across the scenario you describe yet. I have only seen:

  • Register on an environment which locks that domain to the license.
  • Unregistering and using the license on another environment/domain does not allow full use at this point because domains mismatch.