Keygen costs from $99/mo — and unlike a tool you buy once, that bill never stops. Over three years that's roughly $3,564 for software doing a job your own hardware could just as easily do.
Where the subscription actually goes
from $99/mo ($1,188/yr) — Gumroad: 10% + 50¢/sale is the sticker price. It compounds: cancel and you typically lose access to your own history, and most plans ratchet the price up as you add usage, seats or storage — the bill rarely stays flat for long.
Keymaster: the pay-once alternative
Keymaster does the same core job for $49, once. Ed25519-signed license keys your apps verify offline, seat limits, signed downloads & webhooks.
| Keymaster | Keygen | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $49 once | from $99/mo ($1,188/yr) — Gumroad: 10% + 50¢/sale |
| Cost at $10k/yr in sales | $49 total | Keygen $1,188/yr · Gumroad ~$1,050/yr |
| Your own signing keypair | Yes — generated on your box | No — managed for you |
| Offline validation | Yes, ed25519 | Yes |
| Seat limits + fingerprints | Yes | Yes |
| Signed expiring downloads | Yes (15-min TTL) | Yes |
| Self-hosted / your data | Yes — SQLite on your VPS | No |
| Source code | MIT, on GitHub | Closed (hosted) |
Against Keygen's $99/mo entry tier, Keymaster pays for itself in 15 days. Against Gumroad's 10% cut, it pays for itself on your first ~$500 of sales.
Is the subscription ever still worth it?
If you need Keygen's specific ecosystem, integrations or managed infrastructure and that's genuinely load-bearing for you, the subscription earns its keep — that's a real trade-off, not a trick. Keymaster is for everyone else: people paying every month for a job that runs fine on hardware they already own.
Try Keymaster — $49, once
Ed25519-signed license keys your apps verify offline, seat limits, signed downloads & webhooks.