My commercial licence lapsed. What now?
When a licence lapses nothing on your shop changes, so it is easy to miss. This page covers what to check, and why the answer is in your licence terms and not in a general rule.
On this page
First: this is usually recoverable
Most designers selling these licences are individuals, and in most cases they would rather you resubscribed than anything else. That is what tends to happen in this part of the market, not a prediction about your situation. Either way, it is worth an hour to sort it out properly before you start deleting listings in a panic.
Work out what you actually sold, and when
The renewal date is the line most terms turn on. On many licences, sales before that date are covered and sales after it are not — but this is exactly the point where wording differs, and some terms are structured completely differently. If you have your order dates and the renewal date, you have what you need to work it out against the terms you agreed. It is often a smaller number of affected sales than it feels like at 11pm.
What about stock you have already printed?
This is what most people want to know, and the answer depends on the licence. Some terms cover units produced while the licence was live, wherever they are sold. Others tie permission to the moment of sale, which would make finished stock unsellable until you resubscribe. Cubee Hive’s terms are the second kind: when the licence ends, selling printed products has to stop too.
Read the terms you agreed. If you kept a copy from the day you bought, read that one — terms change, and the version on the page today may not be the version you agreed to.
What sellers usually do next
Sellers in this position usually do one or more of these four things. Whether any of them is right for you depends on your terms and your circumstances.
- Pausing the affected listings where the terms tie permission to the moment of sale. You can undo a pause. A strike on your marketplace account is much harder to undo.
- Resubscribing, if they intend to keep selling the design. It is usually the cheapest of the available options.
- Messaging the designer. "I lapsed, I have resubscribed, here is what sold in the gap" tends to land differently from being found out, and most people are reasonable when you get there first.
- Writing down which products depend on which licence, so next time the blast radius takes a minute to establish rather than an evening.
Stopping it happening again
People rarely let a licence lapse on purpose. Usually a card expired, a Patreon payment failed, or nobody was watching the renewal date. Meaning to remember won't fix that. A reminder before the date will.
Whatever you use — a calendar, a spreadsheet, or this — the requirement is the same: something that interrupts you before the date, and a record of which of your products are affected.
What MakerProof does and does not do here
It flags the dates you entered and shows which finished items are linked to a lapsed licence, so you can see what is affected. It does not verify licences, contact designers, or judge whether a particular sale was covered. What a lapse means for your listings is between you, the designer and the platform.
Before the next one
MakerProof emails you at 30, 14 and 3 days before a licence renews, and shows which products would be affected if it lapsed. Free for up to three licences.