Technical Implementation One of the great benefits of CodeMeter is the fact that it has been offering pay-per-use capabilities for many years already and also accommodates offline use. All licenses, be they dongle-based, computer-based, server or cloud licenses, come with a license option for a pay-per-use counter. This unit counter is set to a starting value by you and then begins to count down. You can read the counter automatically and reset or increase it at will, by an absolute figure or by a relative count. This represents the technical underpinnings for any pay-per-use implementation.
With these foundations in place, you can establish both prepaid and consumption-driven models. Prepaid models would start with the unit counter set to a specific value, which is counted down in response to a specific action. That action is prohibited as soon as the counter reaches 0. Consumption models set the unit counter to its maximum value of 4 billion( 0xFF FF FF FF). The countdown begins, and the difference to the maximum value shows you the number of the actual consumed units.
How the unit counter counts down depends on your chosen business model. If you license your products by usage time, the unit counter would, for example, count down by the minute. The total time is recorded as a value in minutes in the license. Of course, you can also set the interval to 5 or 10 minutes. In these cases, you can leave the count down up to AxProtector; a manual implementation is not necessary.
If you want the counter to work by numbers of processed dental implants, by printed objects, or by device calibrations, for example, you include this in the API at the right place in your application. This can be done securely by setting the counter to count down first before the actual action is allowed. Naturally, the counter can also be set to count down after the fact. You can also set the counter to deduct
different values for different operations, e. g. two units for a canine implant, but three for a molar.
Only Proprietary Material One common requirement for pay-per-use models is that the machine user is given discounted access to the machine, but only allowed to process material on it that was supplied by the manufacturer.
The most pragmatic way of doing so is a combination of a pay-per-use counter with a defined amount of material. Your user is
allotted x pieces of material and y units. Every time one piece is processed, the counter goes down by one unit. This means that the user can only work with the amount of material he or she has actually purchased. It would, of course, be feasible to use the same units to process“ cheap” material from the“ grey” market, but the limit on the actual units makes this choice commercially pointless.
A technically better way is to mark the materials and include means to authenticate the marker in the machine. If the material in question is, for instance, delivered in a cartridge with its own intelligent computing capabilities, a challenge-response technique with asymmetric encryption would be a safe tactic. This is, however, not possible for simpler materials like paper or granulates.
The most sophisticated option would be to define one license per delivery / packaging unit. The license could be tied to specific properties, like a watermark in the material, which would be scanned and checked against the license. It could also be a special property like the typical shrinkage of the implanting block when heat-treating a dental implant.
Creating a Pay-per-Use License The process of creating and delivering a pay-per-use license does not differ from the creation of any other regular license or a subscription or maintenance agreement license. In most cases, the procedure is initiated by an ERP, e-commerce, or CRM solution, which sends the order with the right material number to CodeMeter License Central, where a ticket is created( with an activation code, product number etc.) and returned. You can decide how the user receives the ticket, e. g. as a PIN letter, a license card, or – the fastest and easiest option – by email.
The user can then transfer the license or the units he has purchased onto a local CmDongle, a CmActLicense bound to a given computer, a license server, or a Cloud server. From that point, he or she has access to the license and free units. Typically, that transfer process is integrated in the licensed software( leaving the user to only enter the ticket) or handled via a simple license portal.
There are two options for integrating the interface for creating licenses. Either, you create separate packages with e. g. 10, 100, and 1000 units. Or you create an article and leave the unit counter as a dynamic value. Your choice will depend on the capabilities of your ERP, e-commerce, or CRM solution.
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