KeyvaneBuild licensing yourself or use Keyvane?
Most developers can build a plan check in an afternoon. The cost is in everything around it: limits under concurrency, keys and devices, and Stripe events that arrive late, twice or out of order. Here is what each path involves.
| Area | Building it yourself | With Keyvane |
|---|---|---|
| Plan and feature checks | A plans table, a features table and checks scattered through your code | One call: access.can(feature), with plans edited in a dashboard |
| Usage limits | Counters, period resets and race conditions under concurrent requests | Atomic check-and-consume with idempotency keys and calendar resets |
| License keys | Key generation, storage, validation endpoints and rate limiting | Keys, expiry, suspension, revocation and a publishable key for clients |
| Device limits | Fingerprints, activation tables and a way to free seats | Activations with per-plan limits, managed from the dashboard |
| Stripe webhooks | Signature checks, duplicates, out-of-order events and retries | Verified, stored, idempotent, order-safe processing with replay |
| Failed payments and cancellations | Grace periods, period-end access and dunning edge cases | A grace period and cancellation policy per product |
| Support and audits | Database queries when a customer asks why they lost access | A customer view and an audit log of every change and its cause |
| Ongoing maintenance | Every Stripe API change and every new product repeats the work | Maintained once, shared across all your products |
When building it yourself is the right call
If you sell a single plan with no limits and no license keys, a boolean column updated by one Stripe webhook may be all you need. Build it, verify the webhook signature, and handle customer.subscription.deleted.
Keyvane starts paying off when you have several plans, metered features, desktop or CLI customers with keys, or more than one product to monetize.
What you keep either way
Your Stripe account, your customers and your pricing stay yours. Keyvane identifies customers by your own user IDs, exports to CSV at any time, and can be self-hosted from source.
Build independently. Launch globally. Monetize simply.
Connect your first product in about ten minutes. Free during the public beta.