🔑 Keymaster
Self-hosted license server: signed keys, seat limits, secure downloads — no platform cut.
Keymaster at a glance
| Price | $129, once — no renewal |
| Replaces | Keygen at from $99/mo — roughly $1,188 a year, every year |
| Type | Web app — self-hosted |
| Platforms | Windows, macOS, Linux |
| Category | Developer Tools |
Keymaster features
🔏 Ed25519-signed keys
KM1.
💺 Seat limits & fingerprints
Activation API with machine fingerprints, idempotent re-activation, deactivate to free a seat, signed activation receipts for offline runs. Stable, versioned /api/v1.
📴 Offline validation snippets
Zero-dependency Node and browser/WebCrypto verifiers ship in the repo, and the key format is documented byte-for-byte so you can port it to any language.
📦 Products & versions
Semver releases with artifact upload or external URLs. Customers download via signed URLs that expire in 15 minutes — artifacts are never exposed statically.
🪝 Activation webhooks
Per-product URL + secret, HMAC-SHA256 X-Keymaster-Signature header, 3 retries with backoff, and a full delivery log in the dashboard.
🧑💼 Admin dashboard
Stats and activation chart, license search, issue / bulk-issue / revoke, per-activation deactivate, webhook delivery log.
🌐 Customer portal
/license/
🔒 100% yours
SQLite plus Node built-in crypto — zero native crypto deps, no telemetry, no external services. One Express process on a $5 VPS.
$129 once — that's the whole pricing page
Keygen charges from $99/mo — roughly $1,188 a year, every year. Keymaster is a single payment, and it keeps working whether or not we ever sell another copy.
Or get Keymaster inside the full suite — every app in the catalog, currently $97 for the bundle. See the bundle →
Keymaster guides & pages
Honest answers
Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — MIT source at github.com/bensblueprints/keymaster-mvp, always. $129 buys the packaged installer, updates and priority support. We dogfood it: the onetime-suite's own premium tiers run on Keymaster.
Can offline validation catch revoked keys?
No — and the docs say so upfront. An offline check proves a key is authentic and unexpired; it can't see revocations or seat counts. The shipped snippets show the recommended hybrid: verify offline instantly, check in online periodically, apply a grace period.
Why not just use Keygen?
If you want managed infrastructure, multi-region uptime and someone else holding the pager, Keygen is a solid product — that's what $99+/month buys. Keymaster is for sellers who'd rather own the keypair, the data and the bill: one Node process and a SQLite file on a $5 VPS.