A plugin vendor lives inside someone else’s application — AutoCAD, Revit, Rhino, SolidWorks — and the host’s licensing does nothing for you. Your structural add-in, your fabrication toolbox, your rendering engine needs its own protection, and it has to work wherever the host works.
Seat counting, enforced by physics
The quiet revenue leak in AEC software is not cracked binaries; it is the firm that bought three seats and installed twelve. Server-based floating licenses answer that with infrastructure the customer has to run; account-based licensing answers it with logins that get shared. A dongle answers it with physics: five licenses are five keys, a seat is wherever a key is plugged in, and lending a colleague your license means not having it yourself. No license server, no seat audit, no awkward conversation.
Modules as records
AEC plugins are sold in disciplines — structural, MEP, fabrication, energy analysis — and on a KeyNub each module is a record on the key. Your plugin enables what the records say, and an upsell is one vendor-authorised record write, not a second product with a second installer.
Your content library is the crown jewel
For many AEC vendors the code is the smaller half of the product: the value is the parametric families, profile databases, connection libraries and detail catalogues that took years to build — and that copy as easily as any file. Ship them encrypted and decrypt through the dongle when the plugin loads: a patched copy of your plugin then opens an empty library, because the crack removed the content rather than a check.
Built for host-version churn
You already rebuild for every host release; licensing should not add churn of its own. The KeyNub SDK is a stable C ABI with a .NET assembly on top — the natural fit for Revit and AutoCAD .NET add-ins — plus C++ for ObjectARX and Rhino, Python for scripted ecosystems, and even VBA where drawing-office automation never died. The license code you write for this year’s host release is the license code you ship with the next five.
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