Originally published on the Keylight blog.

A short founder note on why Keylight exists. Every product starts as somebody's unsolved problem; this is mine, and if you are shipping a paid app you have probably run into the same one.

The problem I kept hitting

I wanted to sell a desktop app directly. Not through the App Store — directly, to customers I could actually talk to. The payment side was easy: Stripe is excellent and the decision took an afternoon.

Then I got to licensing, and everything slowed down.