How to handle software licensing on a downloaded product?

Question

Im in the middle of developing a product that i will hopefully be attempting to sell towards the end of the year and i was just wondering what the best way to handle the licensing is.

My Product is going to be a downloadable asp.net web application and at the moment looks like there will be a free version and a premium version.

Im thinking about using serials that i can keep track of on my end, but the question is, Whats the best way to restrict the free version and have the application 'know' its premium? or should i just have 2 branches of the same product instead of trying to do it all in the 1?

Im planning on making a web installer for the product where the user can put in the serial and it will determine what version they have.

Answer 1

you could have an encrypted license file that your system checks for every so often which tells it what "version" it is. You can dynamically restrict functionality based on that.

This allows you to keep a single code base, and also make it impossible for the users of your system to simply change a setting in a config file and get your entire system for free.

This is going to be hard to do with a web app.