Licensing an AWS serverless application

Question

We are developing a subscription model (billed under a monthly or annually) AWS serverless based applications which will be installed on our customer's AWS accounts. Our customer will own this account and we will only have an IAM login which they can remove whenever they want. The problem is how we can protect our application from misusing and restrict the customer if they haven't renewed the subscription for the next billing period. Is there any in-built or AWS recommended approach to handle this kind of scenario in serverless?

Answer

I am also looking for a similar solution. Did you find any solution or hack? I did find https://aws-ia.github.io/cloudformation-aws-marketplace-saas/#_overview but that is to meter SaaS applications using AWS Marketplace. Could this work?

Is there any way we can protect/license/codesign/obfuscate our lambda code so we can run it in customer's AWS account, so they are billed for AWS cloud costs but have to come back to renew or buy more licenses from us?

Answer

You can have in your application some sort of "call home" mechanism which calls your backend to verify that the account is allowed to use the application.

Also, I recommend you look at the AWS Marketplace as a mechanism for distributing your application. I am not sure it has a mechanism to sell serverless applications, but it may have ways to protect you.

Licensing an AWS serverless application

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