Babel Licensing
Babel Licensing is a licensing system for .NET applications and components: digitally signed licenses, a licensing service for activation and floating licenses, and the tools to issue, distribute and monitor them from the desktop, the browser, the command line or an AI assistant.
How Babel Licensing Works
A Babel license is a document signed with an asymmetric key pair. You keep the private key and use it to sign licenses; your application carries the public key and uses it to verify that a license is genuine and unmodified. A license can be an XML file or a compact encoded string, such as a serial a customer can type, and it carries whatever your product needs: the licensee, expiration dates, the features it unlocks, hardware or domain restrictions, and custom fields of your own.
The Babel.Licensing client library validates a license inside the application, offline, so a license file works in disconnected environments. When you need central control, the Babel Licensing Service activates licenses on specific machines, shares floating licenses across a network, tracks license tokens, collects reports from the field and exposes everything over gRPC and REST. On top of the service sit the management tools: Babel Desktop on Windows, macOS and Linux, the administrative web application (Data Center), the WordPress plugin that sells licensed products through WooCommerce, the lic command line tool, and an MCP server for AI assistants.
What’s New
Highlights of the recent releases, up to 12.0.
Manage customers, products, licenses and activations from Claude or any MCP client, in natural language, through the service REST API.
New in 12.0: a cross-platform desktop application for Windows, macOS and Linux that replaces Babel UI. Its Licensing views manage customers, products, orders, licenses and templates on a Babel Licensing Service, and its MCP server lets an assistant do the same.
New in 12.0: a single service package serves both editions; a Data Center license unlocks the web application, with no reinstall.
Since 11.7: no default administrator account, a signing key generated at start-up when none is configured, credentials kept out of the logs, and an IP whitelist that exempts trusted addresses from rate limiting.
Since 11.8 license validation no longer touches the operating-system crypto stack, so licensed applications and the service itself start on FIPS-mode hosts, including containers without a FIPS provider.
Extend the expiration date of an activation license without re-issuing it, and add features that reach already-activated clients on their next validation.
Since 11.8 the lic tool emits JSON or NDJSON, with --quiet and
--strict-exit, using the same output contract and exit codes as the
obfuscator command line.
Editions and Badges
Babel Licensing comes in two editions, and both include Babel Obfuscator Ultimate. Server provides the Babel Licensing Service, the licensing database, Babel Desktop with its Licensing views, the WordPress plugin, the lic command line tool and the client packages, with up to 1000 license tokens. Data Center adds the administrative web application, AI integration through the MCP server, and unlimited license tokens. Both editions use the same service package. With a Server license, the service address shows an upgrade page instead of the web application. To upgrade to Data Center, replace the license file and restart the service.
Two badges mark this in the manual. Server marks a component that comes with the Server edition or higher; it appears on the overview page of each Babel Licensing component, which matters most to readers who own Babel Obfuscator alone. Data Center marks a capability available with the Data Center edition only, and appears on every page that documents one. A heading without a badge describes something both editions include. The obfuscator manual uses Ultimate in the same way, and since both licensing editions include Ultimate, everything marked Ultimate is yours as well. The complete matrix, with pricing, is on the Compare Editions page.
Licensing Modes
A signed XML file or string distributed to the customer and validated offline, with no server involved.
The customer activates a license on a machine; the service binds it to that hardware and can deactivate, extend or revoke it later.
A pool of seats shared across a network, allocated to clients while they run and released when they stop.
The unit the service counts for activated and floating clients: up to 1000 on Server, unlimited on Data Center.
What a License Can Express
Every mode uses the same license model, defined once in a license template and applied to each license you issue:
- Trial restrictions that limit time, run count or instance count, so a customer can evaluate before buying.
- Hardware and domain restrictions that lock a license to a machine or to a network domain.
- Features that switch parts of the product on and off, the basis of tiered editions; combined with the obfuscator’s Code Encryption they become feature-based licenses whose code is not even present until unlocked.
- Custom restrictions and fields for anything else your product needs to check or carry, validated by your own code through the SDK.
- User key formats that define how serials look, so a license can be a string a customer types rather than a file.
See License Restrictions, License Properties and the License Workflow from product definition to deployment.
Components
Activation, floating licenses, tokens, reports and webhooks over gRPC and REST, on Windows, Linux, macOS or Docker, backed by SQL Server, MySQL or SQLite.
The cross-platform desktop application: its Licensing views manage products, customers, orders, templates, licenses, tokens, reports, users and API keys on the service.
Browser administration of the service: dashboard, licenses, templates, products, customers, orders, API keys, webhooks, users and logs. Included in the service package and unlocked by a Data Center license.
Sell licensed products through WooCommerce; licenses are generated and emailed when an order is placed.
The lic dotnet tool generates signed licenses and serials from scripts and
build pipelines.
The Babel.Licensing and Babel.Data NuGet packages that validate,
activate and track licenses inside your application.
Programmatic access to licenses, products, customers, orders, reports and webhooks, authenticated with API keys or JWT tokens.
Exception, license-usage and custom reports sent from the field to the service, with webhooks to forward them.
From product definition and sign keys to templates and deployment, the four stages every license goes through.
Built for AI-Assisted Workflows
Babel Licensing can be operated by an AI assistant at three levels.
Babel Licensing MCP Server Data Center. A standalone Model Context Protocol server exposes the whole REST API of a hosted Babel Licensing Service as tools, so Claude or any MCP client can look up a customer’s licenses, activate or revoke them, create orders, analyze usage and explain errors, in natural language and from anywhere. See AI Integration.
Babel Desktop MCP server Server. Babel Desktop hosts an opt-in local MCP server. It lets an assistant read licensing entities, dashboards and reports and propose changes that you confirm, on the service profile the desktop is connected to, alongside the obfuscation project tools. See Babel Desktop MCP Server.
AI-friendly command line. Since version 11.8 the lic tool shares the machine-readable output mode of the obfuscator: --format=json or --format=ndjson for a structured lic.cli.v1 stream, --quiet for unattended runs, --strict-exit for semantic exit codes, and --help --format=json to let an agent discover every option. See AI-Friendly Mode.
Pick the Babel Licensing MCP Server for a hosted service driven from any MCP client, and the Babel Desktop MCP server when you already work in Babel Desktop and want the assistant to use its connected service profile.
Platforms
| Area | Support |
|---|---|
| Babel Licensing Service | Windows, Linux and macOS on the .NET runtime, or Docker; SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB and SQLite databases (MySQL and MariaDB on every supported .NET version, including .NET 10); gRPC over HTTP/2, gRPC-Web and REST with JSON or TOON payloads |
| Client library | .NET Framework 2.0 to 4.8, .NET Standard, .NET Core and .NET up to .NET 10, ASP.NET, .NET MAUI, Xamarin, UWP and Mono |
| Management tools | Babel Desktop on Windows, macOS and Linux; the web application in any browser (Data Center); the WordPress plugin with WooCommerce; the lic tool wherever the .NET SDK runs |
| Hosting | On-premises or in the cloud, with health checks for orchestrators and load balancers |
Next Steps
- Getting Started to install the service and the client components
- General Features for a feature-by-feature tour
- License Workflow to define a product and issue its first license
- Examples for trial serials, feature-based licenses and activation in MAUI
- API Reference for the REST endpoints