Xbench 3.0 licenses are granted to users, not to individual devices. This means that you can download and install Xbench on any computer connected to the Internet and simply sign in with your user credentials to license the instance and run Xbench.
Xbench 3.0 licenses are time-based. You can purchase one or more years any time. The actual length of your subscription will be determined by the authorized users you define in the Control Panel. So if you buy 2 years and have 4 users, your subscription will last 6 months, or if you buy 4 years and have 2 users, your subscription will last 2 years.
We choose a subscription-based license model instead of a permanent license model because:
- We want to make inexpensive start using it, by avoiding a higher up-front cost
- Our ultimate goal is to build a great product and, to achieve that goal, we want to ensure that our incentives are aligned with making happy both existing and new users. With this model, the monetary reward to keep an existing user is exactly the same as gaining a new user, which is something that does not happen with a permanent license model with upgrades.
- We want that there are no obstacles for our users to use the latest version, as we believe that having a larger user base using the latest version sooner helps to make the latest version also the greatest.
Elastic Licensing for Multi-user Environments
All Xbench licenses are multi-user licenses. Any Xbench account with purchased time can authorize one or more users to use purchased time. Each authorized user is licensed to run one Xbench instance at the same time. Therefore, if you are the manager of a team with 5 Xbench users, you simply need to authorize these 5 users using the Xbench Control Panel.
This video illustrates how to use the Control Panel in a typical multi-user scenario.
The Licensing Model is elastic: authorized users can be added or removed any time. When you add or remove authorized users, your remaining subscription time will be increased or reduced accordingly to match the number of authorized users. The only restriction is that there must be at least one authorized user defined for each 10 years of subscription time purchased.
You can also authorize Xbench users outside of your organization. For example, if you need to lend temporarily a license to a freelance translator to complete a task, you simply need to add the freelance translator email as an authorized user and, once the task is done, simply remove the freelance translator email from the list of your authorized users.
Likewise, when a user is not needed anymore, you simply remove that user from the authorized users list and their unused time will be distributed among the remaining authorized users of the account, extending the length of your subscription accordingly.
Domain Mode Licenses
To greatly ease user administrator or to achieve discounts when users are not active (vacations, extended leaves, etc), you can switch to a Domain Mode license. Domain Mode licenses are explained in detail here.