About
A licensing tool built by a developer, for developers who sell software.
Paperkey is built by Tomi Bequet, a developer based in Paris, for small publishers who sell their software directly. A licensing layer you install in 30 seconds, and that an AI agent can configure end to end. Without the enterprise sales overhead.
Tomi Bequet
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 big sales teams. Paperkey is built for the developer who installs licensing in a few hours, not over 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 bolted on after an audit. The full stack is also available self-hosted under MIT.
Why this exists
If you have ever sold 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 release without monetisation. Paperkey is the path I wanted when I was selling my own apps. A focused product at indie scale, with a proper API, signed webhooks, an MCP server, and an SDK that handles the integration glue. And the option to self-host the whole thing under MIT the day you need it.
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.