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An on-prem license lets you run ORC8R on your own hardware without the demo ceilings. You buy one on orc8r.com, get a key, and paste that key into the License tab of the self-hosted cluster you want licensed. This page covers buying, changing or cancelling a plan, the console page where your keys live, and how to look after a key.

If you are looking for how the licensed server behaves — the ceilings, the renewal and grace timeline, what the server sends home — see Demo mode and licensing.

Buying a license

  1. Open the pricing cards and switch to On-prem. Each card shows a plan's monthly price, its active-node cap, and what it includes. (Need more than the listed plans? The Custom card is an email to sales.)
  2. Click the plan's Choose plan button. You go straight to Stripe Checkout — email and card, nothing else. There is no purchase page in between.
  3. When the payment succeeds you land on a success page showing your license key, with a copy button.

You do not need an account first, and you do not add a payment method as a separate step: Checkout is the sign-up. Afterwards:

  • If the checkout email already belongs to an ORC8R account, the purchase is attached to that account's organization.
  • If it does not, an organization is created for it. The purchase email carries a single-use sign-in link that also verifies the address and lands you on a set-password page. Use it — the success page itself does not sign you in, because Stripe verified a card, not that you own the address you typed.

The key is emailed to you as well, so closing the success page does not lose it.

Each license is one plan, one monthly Stripe subscription, and one cluster at a time. Licensing a second cluster means buying a second license.

Changing or cancelling a plan

Plan changes and cancellation are self-serve through the Stripe billing portal:

  1. Open your organization and go to On-prem licenses.
  2. Click Manage subscription.

From the portal you can switch between plans at their current prices (Stripe prorates the change) and cancel the subscription. Both land back on ORC8R automatically.

What each one does to the licensed cluster:

  • Upgrade or downgrade — the license moves to the new plan, and the new plan's limits reach the cluster with its next lease renewal, within 24 hours. A downgrade is not retroactive: nodes already running keep running, and only growth past the new cap is blocked.
  • Cancel — the subscription stops being valid, so the cluster's next renewal is refused. The cluster then has 14 days of grace, during which it keeps its licensed limits and shows a banner, before it falls back to demo ceilings. Nothing running is ever stopped.
  • Re-subscribing or fixing a failed payment — the cluster recovers on its next renewal on its own. Re-submitting the key on the cluster's License tab recovers it immediately.

If a payment fails, the subscription is not cancelled straight away: Stripe retries on its own schedule, and your organization's owners are notified in the app and by email in the meantime.

The On-prem licenses page

Your organization's On-prem licenses page lists every key the organization has bought:

  • Plan and Status — the plan sold, and the state of its subscription (active, past_due, canceled).
  • Issued — when the key was minted.
  • The key, redacted to its first and last groups.
  • Running on — the cluster currently holding the license: its hostname, instance fingerprint, server version, and when it last renewed. A key that has never been activated says Not activated yet.
  • Activation history — every cluster that has held this license, so a takeover is visible after the fact.

A license that has been taken over three or more times in seven days is flagged Key may be shared. That usually means the key is installed on two clusters that are both live, or that two clusters were restored from one backup — see Demo mode and licensing for how to run this deliberately.

Seeing the page needs billing permission in the organization; revealing a key needs the permission to manage billing.

Looking after a key

A license key is a credential. Anyone holding it can license a cluster with it, which takes the license off whichever cluster holds it now.

  • The console shows keys redacted. Reveal shows exactly one key, on the row you asked for, and only to someone who can manage billing.
  • Treat a key like an API token: do not paste it into a ticket, a chat channel, or a screenshot.
  • The self-hosted server seals the key in its secret store and never renders or logs it in full.
  • If a key does leak, open a support request and we will revoke it and issue a replacement. Revoking turns the leaked key's renewals into an immediate refusal.
  • Demo mode and licensing — the ceilings, entering the key, renewal, grace, and takeover.
  • Billing & plans — plans and payment for ORC8R Cloud, which is billed separately from on-prem licenses.
  • Support — contact us about a license or a key.