Licensing

Licensing

EZ-Kea is open-core. The source is MIT licensed; the application enforces a free-tier limit. This page describes exactly what that means so there are no surprises after you've deployed it.

Free tier

Every feature is available, with no time limit, up to 100 active DHCP leases. Nothing is gated by feature — HA, IPv6, 2FA, reservations, and the rest are all in the free tier.

"Active" means leases in the DHCPv4 lease file whose expiry is in the future. The count is read from disk, not cached, and DHCPv6 leases don't count toward it.

What happens past 100 leases

1. A banner appears and a 7-day grace period starts, counted from the first time the limit was exceeded.
2. During the grace period, everything keeps working normally.
3. After 7 days without a license, configuration changes are blocked.

When blocked:

• Kea keeps serving DHCP. EZ-Kea never stops or reconfigures your DHCP server as a licensing action. Your network is unaffected.
• Existing configuration stays readable. Every page still loads; you can view subnets, leases, logs, and reservations.
• Writes are refused — anything that creates, modifies, or deletes configuration. API requests get HTTP 402; browser requests get an error message and a redirect.

Entering a valid license key clears the grace period immediately.

Buying a license

Email sales@ezkea.com with the number of active leases you need to cover.

A license key encodes a licensee, an expiry date, and a maximum lease count (where zero means unlimited). Keys look like:

EZK1.<base64url-payload>.<base64url-signature>

They're RSA-2048 signed, so they validate offline — EZ-Kea never phones home, and there's no license server to be unavailable when you need it.

Entering a key

Admin → Licensing, paste the key, save. The page shows the licensee, expiry, days remaining, and lease allowance once it validates.

Only admin accounts can reach this page.

Expired or exceeded licenses

• Expired key — treated as unlicensed; free-tier rules apply again.
• Valid key, but more active leases than it allows — writes are blocked immediately, with a message naming the licensed maximum. There's no second grace period in this case, since a licensed deployment outgrowing its key is a billing conversation rather than a surprise.

Source licensing

The repository is MIT licensed — see LICENSE. The MIT grant applies to the source as published. The lease limit is a property of the application as shipped, and we ask that you buy a license if you're running EZ-Kea past the free tier in production.