Core concepts
The vocabulary behind PipKey.
A clean integration starts with a clean authority model. PipKey owns licensing decisions. Your product owns its business behaviour in response to those decisions.
Tenant
The top-level data boundary. PipKey is designed for multi-tenant separation, with each protected operation evaluated in its tenant context.
Product
The software, service or digital product being licensed.
Plan
A commercial/licensing configuration associated with a product. PipKey 1.1 is adding stronger effective-dated plan versioning.
Customer
The person or business receiving the licence. Organisation/team structures are part of the 1.1 commercial expansion.
Licence
The authoritative lifecycle record linking a customer to a product/plan and current licensing state.
Activation
An authorised installation or usage context bound to a licence under its activation policy.
Entitlement
A right or limit attached to use of a product, such as a feature, quantity, time window or future usage allowance.
Offline assertion
A time-bounded Ed25519-signed statement that lets an integrated product verify permitted use without continuous connectivity.
API credential
A machine-to-machine credential with environment, audience and scope restrictions. Raw secrets are returned once and stored server-side only as protected digests.
Release
Versioned product-delivery metadata used for software update eligibility, manifests, package signatures and controlled rollout information.
Authority boundaries
- PipKey: licence state, activation decisions, service credential entitlement, release eligibility and signed licensing evidence.
- Your commerce platform: checkout, payment collection and order records.
- Your product: product-specific behaviour, user experience and business logic that follows a trusted licensing decision.
- Your package storage: controlled product bytes. PipKey can determine eligibility and provide integrity metadata without treating the client as trusted.
Why this separation matters
A payment event should not directly become a licence-state decision without mapping and processing rules. Likewise, a WordPress plugin or desktop application should not become authoritative merely because it has a local copy of a licence key.
Licence states
The active 1.0 lineage supports lifecycle enforcement including active use, suspension, expiry and revocation. Integrated software should treat an explicit denial as authoritative and should not convert network errors into permanent entitlement.