Keygen Blog

1. Yes, I’ve been working on generalizing the Lunar specific code for open sourcing it next month. Still WIP because I’m still getting busy with new monitor edge cases.

Last month I’ve also found out about Keygen (https://keygen.sh/) which has a really nice offering, and I would have probably chosen it instead of building my own solution if I’d known about it. I’m concerned about uptime with my own solution, I don’t have the means to provide enough redundancy in case of a network or data center failure.

2. I’m earning about $3.5k per month on Lunar Pro licenses (on average, some months can be 5-6k, some 2k). Doing quality macOS apps is a nice market to be in. You get to do tools for your own usage and also share them with others for some side revenue.

I’ve also created The low-tech guys (https://lowtechguys.com/) and each new app published there is also bringing about $200-$600 per month.

Little by little, I’m hoping to get to a continuous revenue of $8k per month so I can build a home for my family and have more time to pursue my other hobbies (woodworking: https://reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/t1l4rk/_/hyhvjix/?context=1) and (instrumental music: https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/Dv8AT2JgNWrzFtLa8)

> https://keygen.sh/build-vs-buy/

This is inaccurate and misleading.

The calculator assumes that there's no cost to integrating with your system. It also assumes that the developer is salaried, which is almost never the case when it's a single-person shop.

The amount of effort required to learn your system, to do the integration, to test and to support it is absolutely on par with the time it would take to make a simple licensing framework from scratch. Except that the latter doesn't create an external dependency for a critical part of customers' experience.

This is all from a perspective of desktop software vendor. Perhaps things are different when your service is used for WP plug-ins or web apps, but for desktop apps - IMNSHO - the value of it is fairly low.

I am pretty sure the founder of this: https://keygen.sh/ is on YC or Indie Hackers?

Might solve your license needs.

Otherwise, it depends on a lot of things so it's always a really hard question to answer. Some questions that immediately come to mind: Are you going to need to update frequently? Can they set you up an EC2 instance and give you SSH access, or do you need to do everything? What's the access pattern generally? Can the environment hit the internet? What's the tech stack, and are there multiple services to deploy?

I'd argue that whatever you end up doing, you should attempt to automate if you have the time. In this case, using Terraform and/or Ansible. That way, you have a repeatable process and can iterate on it using source control.

And that's why I built https://keygen.sh, for those that would rather not spend months building a licensing server in-house.

For a second, I thought you were the owner of the .us site, reincarnated it under a different domain, and trying to imply that crackers would create a keygen for your software anyway.

But speaking as someone from the other side ;-) any centralised software protection is going to be dead-easy to crack since the checks and ways it makes them are going to be nearly the same between all apps that use it. FlexLM is an existing example of this.