About
A licensing backend by someone who ships software, not slides.
Paperkey is built by Tomi Bequet, a creative developer based in Paris, for indie devs who ship paid software at small scale. A licensing layer you wire up in 30 seconds, that an AI agent can drive end to end, without the enterprise sales theatre.
Tomi Bequet
Creative developer based in Paris. 14 years building product UI, design systems and infrastructure for startups, architects and creative studios. Co-founder of Studio Kiss. OWASP background and active CVE watch, applied here on the API, the secrets handling, and the webhook signing. Long-form portfolio and side projects on tomi.fr.
Most licensing tools are built for sales engineers. Paperkey is built for the dev who wires up licensing in an afternoon, not on a multi-week sales cycle. Pricing fits solo and small-studio scale. The SDK is MIT-licensed. The full system is documented in plain text, so an LLM can navigate it on its own. Auth, secret hashing, and webhook signing were there on day one, not added after an audit.
Why this exists
If you have ever shipped a paid desktop app, you know the licensing question kills momentum. You write a key-validation script that breaks at the worst time. Or you sign up to a SaaS built for 200-person sales teams. Or you put it off and ship without monetisation. Paperkey is the path I wanted when I was shipping my own apps. A focused product at indie scale, with a proper API, signed webhooks, an MCP server, and an SDK that handles the dull parts.
Built in Paris, hosted in the EU
The team is small and based in Paris. Storage and runtime stay in the EU end to end (Hetzner, Germany). No third-party trackers on this site. The full data residency story is on the security page, with named sub-processors and certifications.