I have a KM macro that I'm going to demo to a potential customer soon. I may charge them for it, or I may give it to them for free to start building a client base. (After all, they may be helping me test my code in a real world situation!) In either case, I will tell them that they will have to pay for a Keyboard Maestro license.
Are there any pitfalls to this process (of getting KM licenses) that I may not be aware of? For example, I can't remember how long it takes to obtain a license for the first time. Is it minutes or hours or longer? Is it possible for me to include KM code in my product that obtains the license for them using their email address? That could make things simpler for them, and for me.
Is the license for a corporation the same as a license for a personal user? I can tell you that my product would not be used by multiple computers in a typical corporation. Just one computer.
P.S. I think they will be astonished by what my macro can do.
I agree completely. Payment must occur. And I don't want to touch anyone else's credit info.
But maybe there is a way to inform stairways software that the "upcoming" purchase of KM by a person using the email address "something@something.com" is due to a macro that I'm selling. That could be good tracking data for Peter and for me.
In a typical software house, there are two ways to do this:
You are the reseller of KM. In this case, the KM license is owned by your end user. You can ask end user to buy KM directly from Peter or, they buy through you, where you get the license from Peter at a lower cost, thus earning some slight margin.
You bundle KM into your macro and selling to the end user your macro software. Normally in this case, the end user does not know the engine running the application, for instance, an end user buy a HR application but does not know the underlying database software, whether it is Oracle or Microsoft. The license is owned by you, not end user. End user does not need to deal with Peter. They only deal with you directly from the context of your macro.
If there’s only one computer using it, or just one person/organization, maybe Option 2 is cleaner, easier to manage.
Interesting. Thanks. I wasn't familiar with option 2. Of course, option 2 requires the cooperation of the author of KM, insofar that every license of KM is associated with a unique email address.
Ahh, I see an icon suggesting that Peter is drafting a reply.
Generally the purchase of a Keyboard Maestro license is minutes, though risk analysis issues can affect that on occasion.
A personal or corporate license is the same. Keyboard Maestro is licensed on a per-user basis (or optionally a license can be used on a per-Mac basis).
You will not be able to include Keyboard Maestro license, it can only be generated by me or FastSpring, and I don't deal with resellers (any resellers, sorry).
You could buy the license yourself, but then giving access to the license to another entity would be problematic since you don't have that right, and you couldn't control how the license was used.
So basically, they would need to buy the license to Keyboard Maestro.
Of course, since Keyboard Maestro has a free trial, it could be set up for them to see before they need to commit to buying the Keyboard Maestro license.
Note also that there are no technical protections for a macro installed within Keyboard Maestro, and so your only protection would be a legal claim of copyright on the macro, and I'm not sure such a copyright has ever even been tested in law anywhere.
