When a software product reaches the point where access needs to be controlled, most teams face the same question:

Should we build our own licensing system, or should we use a dedicated solution?

At first glance, building internally can seem straightforward. Licensing looks like a small part of the system. A few checks, a license key format, maybe a database table. But for teams building and selling software long term, licensing rarely stays simple.

This article looks at the build-vs-buy decision from both a business and engineering perspective, focusing on how licensing behaves over time.

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What a Licensing System Actually Represents

A licensing system is not just a gate that lets users in or keeps them out.

In practice, it becomes part of your commercial infrastructure. It touches:

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• Revenue protection
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• Pricing and packaging
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• Customer onboarding and offboarding
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• Support workflows
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• Product updates and compatibility
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From an engineering standpoint, it also becomes a system that must be reliable, secure, and difficult to bypass.

That combination is what makes the build-vs-buy decision more significant than it first appears.

Building a Licensing System Internally

Building licensing internally gives teams full control over how enforcement works and how it integrates with the product.

In some cases, this can make sense. For example:

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• When licensing requirements are extremely narrow
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• When distribution is very limited
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• When access control is unlikely to change over time
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However, most commercial software products don’t stay static.

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How Internal Licensing Evolves Over Time

What starts as a simple implementation usually grows alongside the business.

Common changes include:

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• New pricing tiers or plans
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• Feature-based access control
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• Time-limited trials and renewals
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• Offline usage requirements
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• Version compatibility across releases
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• Customer-specific exceptions
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Each of these adds logic, edge cases, and maintenance work.

From an engineering perspective, licensing code often becomes:

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• Hard to refactor
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• Risky to change
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• Closely coupled to core product logic
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From a business perspective, it can slow down decisions around pricing and packaging because every change requires development work.

Using a Dedicated Licensing Platform

The alternative is to use a licensing platform that treats licensing as its core responsibility.

Instead of building and maintaining infrastructure internally, teams integrate licensing as a service.

In practice, this usually means:

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• Centralized license creation and management
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• Secure validation handled outside the core codebase
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• Built-in support for different pricing models
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• Clear separation between product logic and access control
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This approach shifts licensing from a custom internal project to a maintained external system.

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Business and Engineering Trade-Offs

From a business perspective, buying rather than building typically offers:

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• Faster time to market
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• Easier pricing and packaging changes
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• Lower long-term operational risk
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• Clear ownership of a non-core function
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From an engineering perspective, it often means:

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• Less custom enforcement code
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• Fewer edge cases to maintain
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• More predictable behavior across environments
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• Reduced security and cryptography burden
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Licensing still exists in the architecture — but it no longer demands constant attention.

Why Teams Often Delay the Decision

Many teams start by building licensing internally with the intention of “revisiting it later.”

The challenge is that later often arrives when:

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• Customers are already relying on existing behavior
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• Licenses are already in use
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• Replacing the system affects every user
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At that point, switching solutions becomes a much larger project than choosing one early.

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Where Devolens Fits In

Devolens provides licensing infrastructure for software companies that want to avoid building and maintaining it themselves.

Teams use it to:

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• Implement licensing without deep custom logic
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• Support multiple pricing and licensing models
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• Enforce access consistently across products
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• Keep licensing separate from core product code
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It’s designed for teams building commercial software where licensing is necessary, but not the product itself.

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Making the Decision

There is no universal answer to build vs buy.

But for software companies planning to:

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• Sell commercially
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• Evolve pricing over time
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• Support multiple customers and environments
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• Minimize long-term maintenance burden
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Licensing tends to behave more like infrastructure than application logic.

In those cases, treating it as such — by using a dedicated system — is often the more durable choice.