Introduction

What License Cart does#

License Cart is a software license server that runs inside your own WordPress install. It is built for plugin and theme vendors who want to sell licensed software without WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads or a hosted licensing service taking a cut.

Paddle Billing is the merchant of record: it handles checkout, cards, VAT and sales tax. License Cart handles everything after the payment:

• Issuing keys automatically. Signed Paddle webhooks create the customer, generate a license key and email it, usually within seconds of checkout. Renewals, cancellations, pauses and resumes keep the license status in sync.
• Licensing and update API. activate, deactivate, status and update/check endpoints with domain-bound activations, activation limits and rate limiting. Your customers’ plugins call your site, never ours.
• Private releases and gated updates. Upload release ZIPs from the dashboard. Valid licenses receive signed download links that expire after five minutes; the files themselves are never publicly reachable.
• Customer portal. The [lc_portal] shortcode gives customers a passwordless magic-link login to see their keys, activations and downloads.

It also includes an admin dashboard for products, pricing packages, licenses, customers, releases, webhook logs and settings, optional Cloudflare R2 backups of all license data, and developer tools (an integration prompt generator, a client SDK template and a read-only MCP server) to wire licensing into the plugin you sell.

Who it is for#

• Vendors selling one or more premium WordPress plugins or themes directly from their own site.
• Developers who want full control of license data in their own database.
• Teams who prefer Paddle as merchant of record so they do not have to handle global tax themselves.

Next steps#

1. Check the Requirements.
2. Install the plugin and activate your License Cart key.
3. Follow the Quick Start to connect Paddle and issue a test license.