Most software today is SaaS or subscription-based, but desktop and offline applications still rely heavily on licensing systems more than I expected.

A year ago, I built Keymint because I needed a flexible software licensing system for a project I was working on.

At the time, I expected the space to be shrinking due to the shift toward SaaS. Once I started building and testing it in real scenarios, it became clear that desktop, CLI, and offline software still has a strong need for licensing and activation systems.

That led me to expand Keymint into a more general-purpose licensing system.

What it currently supports

REST API and SDKs for multiple languages

License key generation and validation

Online and offline activation flows

Audit logs for tracking usage and abuse patterns

Customer self-service portal

Key engineering challenges

Most of the complexity was not in generating license keys.…