Workshop software may be the most pirated category in professional software: diagnostic suites and calibration tools are cloned wholesale and sold on grey-market sticks with the protection already cut out. It is also a category where the legitimate customer works in a pit, on a forecourt, or out of a van — places where account-based licensing is a daily irritation.
The license lives in the van
A workshop laptop is shared between mechanics, rebuilt when it dies, and offline more often than not. Tie the license to a key rather than a login or a machine and all of that stops mattering: whoever holds the dongle holds the license, a replacement laptop is a non-event, and nobody types a password with work gloves on.
Coverage packages as records
Diagnostic software is sold by coverage — brands, protocols, truck versus passenger, ADAS functions — and every package maps to a record on the key. Extending a customer’s coverage is one vendor-authorised record write through your shop system, not a new stick in the post. Metered operations — a pay-per-use tier for expensive functions — ride on the key’s counters.
The data is the product — ship it encrypted
What grey-market clones actually steal is rarely your executable; it is your years of accumulated vehicle data — definitions, parameters, procedures. Ship those files encrypted and open them through the dongle at run time, with the coverage records deciding what the software offers: a copied installation without a genuine key is a menu with nothing behind it. That is a materially harder target than any checked-then-patched boolean.
Built in the languages workshops run on
This industry’s software is famously long-lived: Delphi and Visual Basic 6 tools still diagnose cars every day, alongside C++ where the protocol stacks live and C# in the newer suites. KeyNub ships maintained, documented bindings for all of them — the 1998 codebase and the 2026 one integrate the same afternoon.
All industries · All supported languages · Buy a KeyNub · Ask us something
