Dike is a licensing platform borned to fill Envato lacks on author licenses protection.
There is no control over licenses term compliance by customers and this led continue abuses through the years, generating huge money losses.
Controlling our product licenses we automatically become the real figure customers have to address to use them. This is essential for any business. Dike it's addressed to WordPress plugin and theme developers.
Its pillar is the Envato's "one license per project" clause.
The solution is composed by two parts:
There is a constant licenses revalidation between customers website and your Dike platform to be always sure license is valid and used on a single project.
Well, of course! 😄
LICENSING PART: Dike just executes Codecanyon and Themeforest license terms clearly stating a single license (related to a purchase code) can be used only on a single-end product. On the web this is equivalent to a single domain.
Because of this, if you allow your product to be sold on third-party projects, Dike can't be your solution.
UPDATES PART: selling on Envato we are obliged to give lifetime updates to customers. Because of this you must always keep the Codecanyon/Themeforest product up to date.
However this obligation doesn't cover "automated-updates" systems. Customers will be always able to manually update products downloading the package from Envato websites.
Dike's aim is to collect customer purchases data to create and manage activation tokens.
Therefore purchase code, license type and purchase date will be fetched from Envato.
In addition to username, the customer is prompted to insert an e-mail.
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We all know how hard and time-consuming is to maintain our products updated. It's been years since the industry standard is set on recurring payments in order to get software updates (eg. pay X to have one year of updates).
Envato will probably never follow this business model and this damages authors. In addition, sometimes, customers not owning support entitlement mess up things updating outdated products and this led to extra support requests and/or discontent and/or bad ratings.
In over a decade of LCweb's experience, we learnt how customers care about being able to update products simply clicking on their websites.
Why not try creating a sort of a recurring income then?
Yes:
In case Dike services stop (for whatever reason) or you want to stop using them, you will be able to address your customer validation calls and unlock products. Otherwise, Dike codes included in your products will block them and customers wouldn't be happy for sure.
Dike codes have been composed:
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Therefore it works on any WordPress theme or plugin
Elements doesn't give a purchase code, since there's no direct sell. Becase of this would be impossible to activate your products.
Therefore, you can't use Dike on products listed on Envato Elements
Clearly no one can guarantee such things.
Dike "simply" gives you the structure to force customers adhere to rules and pay what they need to pay.
Statistically a percentage of customers totally ignore Envato license rules, then is statistically possible you will earn more.
Pay automated-updates are another relevant side of this speech: explaining the reason why they have to pay (please refer to "Why binding automated-updates to support entitlement?" FAQ), support renewal earnings statistically increase.
While ratings totally depends on customers and on their experience with the author, there are few important points to highlight:
This FAQ is being written on 9 August 2022 and, in 6 months of Dike, LCweb just received 5 bad ratings out of more than 10.000 registered licenses. 3 of them were removed by Envato since they were infringing policies.
On the other side, several customers owning multiple licenses expressed their satisfaction in using a practical system ordering their licenses per domain.
Let's be clear: any open source project (plugin or theme) might be read and managed by anyone skilled enough to understand how it works.
Unfortunately Envato prevents Themeforest authors to use crypted PHP codes and this is surely a gift for fraudsters, however Dike codes are minified to try making it a bit harder to decrypt its systems.
Therefore is not possible to guarantee your plugin/theme won't be available somewhere in the web, for free.
While licenses validation and update systems are totally locked down by Dike security systems.
As written in the previous FAQ, is not possible to have the guarantee our products won't be illegally available for free.
Why not use the Dike licensing as anti-piracy measure then?
Often users use illegal copies of our products just to test them out before purchasing.
Advertising free trials you will surely grab more attention and have the opportunity to hook potential customers, while fighting piracy.
Dike has been built as first to be safe for both authors and customers.Â
That's why the logical answer was to have a bank-like login system requiring a fresh token expiring each 60 minutes and sent exclusively on customer's e-mail.
We know this might be also a kind of an hassle and there is also a cookie-based "remember me" option.
Finally, no concurrent connections are allowed.
The project borned to bring equity and justice over Envato author licenses.
DIKE is the greek goddess of the justice (read more on wikipedia)