Premium edition

Licensing and activation

At a glance

A NextPDF Premium license unlocks the NextPDF Pro and NextPDF Enterprise capabilities on top of the open-source core. You obtain a subscription or an evaluation grant, activate it for each deployment, and use the capabilities your edition includes. Adoption requires no application code change. Premium plugs in behind the same public contracts your application already targets, so the code you have written stays intact.

This page describes licensing at the product level. For the exact terms, durations, and pricing that apply to your subscription, consult your license agreement or contact sales through the license portal.

Editions and licensing

NextPDF Premium ships as a single package that carries both commercial editions. The license you activate selects which edition is active — installing the package does not by itself grant NextPDF Pro or NextPDF Enterprise.

A license names an edition, and the editions are cumulative: NextPDF Pro includes everything in the open core, and NextPDF Enterprise includes everything in NextPDF Pro. A license is delivered as a signed envelope — a self-contained, signed artifact that names your edition and entitlements. Treat the license envelope as a credential. Store it with the same care as an API key and keep it out of public version control.

To install the package once you hold credentials:

composer require nextpdf/premium

The feature matrix shows which capabilities each edition includes, and Choose your path helps you decide between the open distributions and a commercial edition.

How you buy

Commercial licences are sold through our Merchant of Record — an authorised reseller that is the seller of record for your order. It runs checkout, takes payment, issues your invoice, and calculates and collects any VAT or sales tax for your location. Your licence to use NextPDF is granted by PATEON under the EULA; PATEON does not itself process card payments or invoice buyers. For the full purchase path, the two-contract model, and who to contact for billing versus product help, see Buying and licensing. Refund and withdrawal terms are in the Refund & Cancellation Policy.

Evaluation mode

You can evaluate NextPDF Premium with the full feature set before you buy. Evaluation output carries a visible watermark by design, so evaluation builds are clearly marked and not suitable for production delivery. The watermark is the only functional difference during evaluation — every capability is available for you to assess.

A paid license removes the watermark with no application code change. You do not rewrite, reconfigure your document code, or learn a second path. Activating a paid license switches off evaluation branding. To start an evaluation, request a grant from sales at the license portal.

Activate a license

Activation is a product-level step you run once per deployment — production, staging, or a build runner. At a high level:

Obtain a subscription or an evaluation grant from sales.
Place the signed license envelope where your deployment loads it, following your deployment’s configuration convention.
Run your application’s activation step. Most integrations expose it as a console command, for example through your framework’s command runner.

After activation, the runtime operates from cached license state and does not depend on the license service being reachable for normal document processing. Deployments without outbound internet access are supported. Because the license is a self-contained signed artifact, an air-gapped environment runs by installing the license envelope produced for that deployment.

This offline and air-gapped capability describes the signed-source delivery channel. Premium builds delivered through the ionCube-encoded channel instead verify their licence periodically online — roughly a 7-day check that renews an approximately 14-day lease — and if they stay offline past that lease, premium features fall back to the free Core until connectivity returns. See Two delivery channels for the full comparison.

When a paid subscription reaches its end date, the software does not stop. It first enters a grace period in which entitled capabilities keep working while you renew, and then a perpetual-fallback state in which the installed version keeps running but updates and support are no longer entitled. You are never locked out of software you have already deployed. The precise grace duration and renewal terms are defined by your license agreement.

Why it works this way

The license resolves at runtime through the same Core contracts your code already targets. That one decision is what removes the code change: an edition upgrade swaps entitlements, not integration surface. The license is a self-contained signed credential, not a live service dependency, so cached state drives normal processing and air-gapped deployments run unattended. Expiry degrades to perpetual fallback rather than a lockout, so you keep running the version you deployed. The model is deliberately additive and reversible: you pay for capability, never for the right to keep or leave what you installed.

Design background: Open core, no lock-in.

Publication boundary

This page documents externally observable behavior and the supported public API surface only. Internal namespace paths, helper classes, mechanism tables, runbook filenames, and ticket prefixes are out of scope.