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What is Keylight

Keylight is a licensing platform for Apple-platform apps. You drop in a Swift SDK, point it at the Keylight backend, and your app can sell, activate, and validate licenses - online or offline.

It is purpose-built for the indie and small-team case: one developer, a handful of products, Stripe for payments, no DRM team, no Kubernetes cluster.

What you get

Section titled “What you get”
  • A Swift SDK that gates features with a single @Published state (.trial, .licensed, .expired, .invalid) and handles activation, validation, storage, and offline verification for you. See Keylight.manager.
  • A hosted dashboard for managing apps, key types, and licenses. Mint keys by hand, revoke compromised ones, view active instances per license. See Managing licenses.
  • Offline-first verification. Every successful activation or validation returns an Ed25519-signed lease the SDK can verify locally for days without a network. See Offline leases.
  • Stripe Connect for zero-plumbing checkout, or a manual webhook mode for teams that already run their own Stripe. See Connect onboarding and Manual webhook mode.

Who it’s for

Section titled “Who it’s for”
  • Indie Mac and iOS developers selling paid apps outside the App Store.
  • Teams that want a Stripe-first funnel without App Store fees on direct sales.
  • Anyone who wants licensing logic to live in a framework, not in if let license = ... { } scattered across their codebase.

What it’s not

Section titled “What it’s not”
  • Not DRM. A determined attacker with a jailbroken device can bypass any client-side license check, including Keylight’s. Keylight aims to be honest friction for honest customers - not unforgeable. See Threat model.
  • Not a payments processor. Stripe holds the money. Keylight mints and tracks the keys.
  • Not a general-purpose auth platform. If you need SSO, user accounts, or team features, Keylight is the wrong tool.

Next

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