Originally published on the Keylight blog.
If you ship the same product on more than one platform — a native Mac build, an Electron or Tauri desktop app, a Rust CLI — the licensing question is not "how do I license each one?" It is "how do I license all of them without running three disconnected systems?" The answer is a single control plane: one tenant that owns your customers, keys, and device limits, with thin SDKs in each app that all read the same signed lease. This post is the build guide for that setup.
What "one control plane" means
A control plane is the place the licensing truth lives. With Keylight it is your tenant: one account that holds every customer record, every license key, the activation count and limit on each key, the entitlements each key grants, and the Stripe connection that mints keys on purchase. The dashboard, the revocation controls, the activation resets — all of it operates on that one set of records.
The SDKs are deliberately not the control plane. They are clients. Each one does the same three things in its own language: exchange a key for a signed lease, verify that lease locally, and read entitlements from it. None of them holds authority over whether a license is valid — they verify a document the control plane signed. That separation is the whole point. It means a customer who buys once exists once, and a device limit of three means three devices total, not three per platform.
