Theme Licensing for Authors

[Insanustu]

Hey everyone,
So We have been developing our theme recently and its our first ever b2c theme and we never dealt with licensing and updating, is there any easy solution to it or does envato has anything for this? I came across this article

How to verify a purchase code using the Envato API

This is a community guide for authors who want to implement purchase code verification on their items, websites, and applications. If you have any questions or feedback then please feel free to respond directly to this topic.  This topic is a wiki. All active members of the forums can edit it. Don’t hesitate to make corrections or add in any new information. All contributions are welcome! Just want some working code to get started quickly? There are some functi…

but that seems a bit of work for licensing lol, also it does not cover on how to protect your theme from getting nulled, and I have a feeling there are easier solutions to this and I did not find any tutorial on how to have a theme updating mechanism

Would really appreciate if anyone could clarify on this,
Thanks

[ki-themes]

It’s one of the solution that you could use but it’s not 100% effective.

@Insanustu

ow to protect your theme from getting nulled

If it’s gonna get nulled, it will. It doesn’t matter if you have the “license verification” inside of the theme/code. You can focus on “support” part which would lead the users to purchase the item directly from you.

[baileyherbert]

When you sell a theme, you’re selling code that can be tampered with. License checks can be removed or altered. I’ve mentioned this on the forums before: even billion-dollar software giants like Adobe fail to stop piracy, so it’s unrealistic that you will be able to do better.

Another thing to consider is that even if your work doesn’t end up pirated, it doesn’t mean your sales will increase. Genuine buyers don’t look for pirated versions of items before committing – they want updates and support. The only people looking for that stuff are the ones who weren’t willing to spend money to begin with.

License verification is great for established authors who want to streamline their support systems and enforce activations. It’s not something I recommend a new author invests time into, at least not until your first item is approved and selling.

[Insanustu]

Thanks for your reply Bailey,
Yes I totally agree with you at the end its gonna get pirated and there is nothing we can do to stop it.
but I personally rather to have a safe guard in the first place so it would not be easy as copy and pasting,
is there any solution for it like a easy to implement one?

[baileyherbert]

There’s nothing pre-existing. It shouldn’t be too much effort to implement a license check:

1. Your theme asks for purchase code upon activation.
2. The buyer enters their purchase code into the theme.
3. Your theme connects to your own API and sends the purchase code.
4. Your API checks the purchase code with the Envato API and returns true or false.
5. Your theme receives “true” and allows the buyer to proceed.

That’s a rather basic implementation which shouldn’t take much effort. But of course, it would only take a developer a few minutes to remove that license check entirely, so you’re effectively doing nothing to stop pirates and only creating more work for genuine buyers.