NCache Licenses

This section aims to educate you about the various NCache licensing models. It details license activation, renewal, auto-renewal settings, and license management best practices for the NCache Enterprise and Community editions. However, please note that NCache Community is free and you will only have to pay for support after activation.

Important

For license information, please refer to the Alachisoft Pricing Page or contact Alachisoft Sales.

Perpetual Licenses

NCache offers a grandfathered licensing option for existing customers with Perpetual license. With this model, you continue to own your licenses indefinitely and only pay for annual maintenance and support to keep them active. The first year of support is mandatory. 24/7 support is available as an optional add-on but requires an active maintenance agreement. If support is discontinued, a reactivation fee will be required to resume coverage. This option is ideal for long-time customers who prefer to maintain perpetual ownership while utilizing NCache's 24-hour support.

Annual Subscription

NCache offers an Annual Subscription for customers seeking a cost-effective, long-term solution for production workloads that demand high availability and performance. The Annual Subscription is paid once per year and includes both maintenance and standard support. However, 24/7 support is sold separately and requires an active maintenance and support agreement. Licenses are consumed per machine and remain valid for one year from the date of purchase. This license can be renewed annually to continue uninterrupted access and support. This model is ideal for stable, ongoing deployments where predictable performance and support are essential.

Monthly Servers

Note

The Monthly option is not available by default, you will have to contact Alachisoft Sales to purchase it.

NCache offers a Monthly Licensing option if you have an active Annual or Perpetual license, ideal for catering to seasonal or short-term spikes. Monthly licenses can be requested either at the start or middle of the year. These prepaid licenses are valid for 30 days from activation and consumed per machine.

Important

You may deactivate the machine at any time to stop recurring activation. However, once a license is activated, it will expire 30 days from the activation date, regardless of when the machine is deactivated. This date cannot be extended.

You can choose between one-time or recurring activation. In the case of recurring activation, the license for the next month is automatically triggered during the final 7 days of the current period, provided additional monthly licenses are available. However, in the case of one-time activation, the machine will not attempt reactivation. Although, the grace period will be in effect and you will receive warnings in the last week before expiry.

Keep in mind that any unused full months expire at the end of the Annual Subscription cannot be carried forward. However, in the case of Perpetual Licenses, you can utilize any purchased monthly licenses indefinitely, as long as your support and maintenance agreement remains active. This model enables flexible, short-term scaling without long-term commitment.

Important

You must renew the subscription at the end of the subscription period. Otherwise, NCache will stop all running caches after a grace period post-expiry (7 days). When this happens, you have to reactivate your NCache license through the Register-NCache command line tool.

Hourly Servers (NCache Cloud)

Note

The Hourly option is not available by default, you will have to contact Alachisoft Sales to purchase it.

NCache offers an Hourly Subscription model for when you want a flexible, short-term option to quickly deploy and test NCache Cloud without a long-term commitment. With this model, you can subscribe to NCache Cloud monthly but pay only for the VM resources in use. Essentially, you are charged hourly until deactivation (irrespective of whether your machine is up or connected to the internet). This model is ideal for rapid scaling and testing while keeping costs aligned with usage.

If you have an Annual Subscription for NCache Cloud, you can purchase extra hourly servers as needed, which are billed similarly on an hourly basis.

Warning

If you’ve activated an Hourly machine, it must maintain consistent internet connectivity to allow Alachisoft to monitor server health, i.e., whether the machine is healthy and running. Without a stable connection, your caches will become non-functional after a few days.

In This Section

Licensing Model
Explains the licensing models available for NCache.

License Management
Explains how to activate, deactivate, and reactivate the license for NCache.