Why Keylight exists
App businesses that grow past their first few hundred customers tend to run into the same wall. Stripe is excellent at payments, but it doesn't know what a license is. The App Store handles licensing for you, but the trade-offs — the 30% cut, the distribution gates, the policies that change without warning — push more developers to sell direct every year.
Keylight is the licensing layer between Stripe and your app. Stripe takes the payment; Keylight mints, signs, and verifies the license your app reads at runtime — including offline, with Ed25519-signed leases that work in a tunnel or on a plane.
Who's behind it
Keylight is built by Nicolas Demanez, an indie developer who spent years wiring license keys, refund edge cases, and Stripe webhooks by hand across his own apps before deciding the infrastructure deserved its own product.
What we believe
Use Stripe for payments. Use Keylight for licensing. You own your customers, you own your billing relationship, and you stop paying a platform cut on revenue that doesn't depend on the platform.
The licensing layer should be infrastructure, not a SaaS you rebuild on every app. Drop in the SDK, point it at your dashboard, ship.
Tell us what to build
Keylight is built in the open, shaped by the developers using it. If something's missing, broken, or doesn't fit how you ship your apps, we want to hear it — send us your feedback. Every suggestion is read; most get answered the same week.