How licensing works

Software licensing is where most of the money is lost — not on price, but on buying the wrong thing. This page is what we would tell you on the phone.

Subscription or perpetual

• Annual subscription. You have the right to use the software for twelve months. When it expires the software stops working, or drops to a read-only mode. Microsoft 365, Creative Cloud and everything from Autodesk work this way.
• Perpetual. Bought outright, yours to keep, no renewal. Windows 11 Pro and Windows Server are perpetual. They do not get new versions — a perpetual licence buys the version you bought.

A perpetual licence at a similar price to an annual one is not better value by default: it is a different thing. Every product page says which it is, above the fold.

Microsoft subscriptions arrive in a new tenant

Every Microsoft subscription sold here is a CSP subscription, bought in the region we trade in. Microsoft will not attach one of those to a tenant that already exists in a different region, so it provisions a new tenant, with a new tenant ID, for your order.

This matters more than it sounds. If you already run Microsoft 365, the seats you buy here will not appear beside your existing users. They are a separate directory: separate sign-ins, separate mailboxes, separate SharePoint. Your current tenant is untouched — nothing is migrated, merged or moved.

If what you want is more seats on the tenant you already have, tell us before you order and we will say plainly whether we can do it. Buying the wrong one is the expensive mistake this page exists to prevent.

Named users, not devices

Adobe and Autodesk licence by named user. A seat belongs to one person, identified by their email address, and that person can install on more than one machine. It is not a floating licence and it is not a device licence: two people cannot share one seat, even at different times of day.

Windows is the opposite — licensed to the device, not the person, and not transferable to another machine once activated.

Reassigning a seat

When someone leaves, their seat can be reassigned to their replacement through the publisher's admin console. You do not need to buy another one and you do not need us to do it. Adobe and Autodesk both allow this; Microsoft 365 seats are reassigned the same way in the 365 admin centre.

Publishers do impose limits — typically not reassigning the same seat more than once every ninety days — to stop a single seat being rotated around a whole team.

Renewals

Nothing bought here renews automatically. We email you a month before expiry with the current price, and you decide. If you do nothing, the subscription lapses on its end date and the software stops.

Renew before the expiry date where you can. Letting a subscription lapse and restarting it later is sometimes treated as a new purchase at list price rather than a renewal, and with Autodesk in particular that difference is substantial.

Multi-year terms

Several Autodesk products are meaningfully cheaper on a three-year term than on three consecutive annual ones. If you know you are keeping it, ask us before buying annual — we will tell you when the multi-year price is worth it and when it is not.

Volume and agreements

Above ten seats the price on this website is no longer the best one available to you, and the licensing programme usually changes too. That is not an upsell — a volume agreement genuinely costs less per seat and is administratively simpler. Ask for a quote.

How to spot a licence that will stop working

Grey-market keys are everywhere and the price is the giveaway. A key at a fifth of the prices on this page is one of these:

• An education or not-for-profit licence resold commercially, which the publisher revokes when it notices.
• A volume key from a large agreement, split up and resold — revoked when the audit happens.
• A key bought with a stolen card, which is cancelled on chargeback, usually two to three months in.
• A regional licence sold outside its territory, which fails to activate or is deactivated later.

In each case the software stops, the money is gone, and you have no recourse. We are an authorised reseller and every licence we supply is traceable to the publisher, which is most of what you are paying the difference for.

We are the reseller, not the licensor

The licence is between you and Microsoft, Adobe or Autodesk, on their own end-user terms, which you accept when you activate it. We sell it, invoice it, and help you when something goes wrong with it. We cannot change what it permits, and neither can anyone else selling it.

Support for the software itself comes from the publisher. Support for the purchase — activation, assignment, invoices, renewals — comes from us, and we would rather you asked us first.