Pro licence

Pro is a one-time purchase for a relay you run yourself. It is not a subscription, it does not expire, and it does not check in with us. If you would rather we ran the relay, see Hosted instead.

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What it unlocks

Nothing enforces the retention row on a relay you run yourself. There is no sweep: the Cloudflare Worker template ships no cron, and the Node self-host keeps them until you remove them unless you set SHOT_RETENTION_DAYS. That row describes the entitlement, which is what the hosted service applies to a Free account. Your disk is yours and your licence does not change that. Everything else is the same on both. Every destination, every widget feature, the whole admin panel, the API, and the self-hosting story are free forever and always will be.

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Buying

$79, once, at burnsidesteps.com. That covers every version, including ones we have not written yet. There is no renewal, no update window, and no maintenance fee. A key bought today still works on a release we ship in five years.

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What arrives

A key beginning bsl1, by email, immediately after checkout. It is signed with Ed25519 and your relay verifies it locally, against a public key compiled into the relay itself. There is no licence server. Activation works on a machine with no outbound internet, we never learn that you activated it, and nothing stops working if we are down or if we stop existing. The key carries no personal data. Its payload is a licence id, the tier, and the date it was issued, encoded rather than encrypted, so anyone you send it to can read all of it. Your email address is not in there: we keep the record of which licence went to which buyer in our own database, where it is needed for support and for sending you the key again. That means a key is safe to paste into a support thread or a screenshot, and it also means a key does not identify you, so anyone holding it can activate it.

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Activating it

1. Open the /admin path on the domain where you deployed your relay.
2. Go to the Licence tab.
3. Paste the key and press Activate.

There is nothing to configure first. The relay already carries the public key it needs to check your licence, on every deployment target: Cloudflare, Node, and the Docker image alike. The tab then reads Plan: Pro, with the first part of the licence id and the date it was bought. Quote that id if you ever write to support@burnsidesteps.com about the licence. Remove takes it off again and drops the relay back to Free. If the key is rejected, the panel says so. The two reasons are a key that was mistyped or truncated in transit, and a key that was minted for a different signing key than the one your relay checks against, which only happens if you have set LICENSE_PUBLIC_KEY yourself.

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Minting your own licences

Forks that run their own licensing set LICENSE_PUBLIC_KEY to their own key, which overrides the built-in one. relay/scripts/gen-license-keypair.ts generates a pair and relay/scripts/sign-license.ts signs keys with it, printing the key on stdout and its licence id on stderr so you can record who each one went to. Leave the variable unset and blank and your relay checks against ours, which is what makes a key bought from us work with no setup.

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The gate is an honor system, and we would rather say so

The relay is AGPL. You can read the licence check, and you can delete it. We have not built anything to stop you, and under that licence we could not add terms forbidding it even if we wanted to. So Pro is a request rather than a lock. It is how a small project stays funded and keeps shipping. If Burnside Steps is earning you money, pay for it. If you are a student, or between jobs, or building something that will never make a penny, take it and go build.

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We cannot switch your key off, and we have not tried

A licence is checked entirely on your own relay. Your key carries a signature, your relay carries the public key that verifies it, and nothing contacts us. That is what makes Pro work on a machine with no internet connection, behind a corporate proxy, or on a network that has never heard of us. It also means there is no revocation. If you ask for a refund we will give you one, and your key will keep working, because the only thing that could stop it is a check that phones home, and a check that phones home breaks self-hosting for everyone else. We would rather trust you. The same is true in reverse, and it is the part worth knowing before you need it: If our signing key were ever compromised, we would have to retire it, and that invalidates every licence signed with it at once. Keys name the key that signed them, so a relay can hold several and we can add a new one without disturbing anything. Removing one is different: it is all-or-nothing, and we would only do it if the private key had leaked. If that ever happens, you do not need to do anything except update your relay and paste the new key we send you. We keep a record of every licence against the email it was issued to, which is the only reason we can reissue at all. Nobody has to prove anything to us.