Licensing

as2d is commercial software activated by a signed license file. The file is issued to you at purchase, is a few hundred bytes of text, and is installed alongside the server’s configuration — see Installing your license.

Two commercial models

Subscription — the license carries an expiry date. The server enforces it gently: after expiry there is a 14-day grace period during which everything keeps working while the logs, health endpoint, and metrics warn loudly; only after grace does the server stop accepting AS2 traffic (partners receive a clean, retryable HTTP 503 — messages are not lost, their retry mechanisms redeliver once you renew). Renewing is a file update; no restart is needed on Kubernetes.

Perpetual — the license never stops a running server. Instead it carries a maintenance-until date that gates which releases it activates: any build released on or before that date runs forever; a newer build asks you to renew maintenance first. You keep what you bought, renewals buy upgrades.

What a license covers

Licenses encode entitlements, so pricing can match usage:

• send and/or receive
• asynchronous MDNs
• the set of encryption algorithms
• messages per day (per running instance)
• maximum number of trading partnerships

If your configuration ever exceeds the license (say, an eleventh partnership on a ten-partnership license), the server tells you precisely what and why at startup — never by failing a partner’s message at 2 am.

What enforcement never does

• It never blocks receipts for messages already sent — in-flight exchanges always complete.
• It never drops queued deliveries — an expired license pauses outbound work, it does not discard it.
• It never phones home. Validation is a local cryptographic signature check against a key built into the software; as2d makes no network calls for licensing.