Editions
BareBones Ticketing is licensed as Trial, Free Edition, Professional, or the Lifetime License. This page describes the four, defines the two terms the limits are counted in, and states what is currently available to download.
How licensing works
A licence key is issued by the Finlay.works website. A System Administrator enters it in the Product License control. The installation submits the key to the Finlay.works licensing authority, which returns an edition, a status, an expiry date, a worker limit, and an activation limit. The installation enforces what came back.
Capacity comes from the response for the key configured on that installation. The product does not add capacity from another key, an account total, a subscription, a checkout return, a payment record, or a local file. To change a limit, the returned limit has to change.
The key is stored protected. The product shows whether a key is present, not the key itself.
Worker
A worker is an active internal user who can do staff
work: one holding a SystemAdmin grant, directly or through
an active group, or one whose group membership reaches an enabled
department through active department access, at any level including
View. Department access is always group-mediated —
there is no per-user department access in the product. Each such user
counts once, however many departments or groups reach them.
Requesters are not workers. External participants are not workers. Customer Portal requesters are not workers. None of them count against the worker limit.
Activation
An activation is one installation registered against a key. Production and staging are two installations, so they are two activations. A disaster-recovery copy registered against the same key is a third.
The four editions
| Trial | Free Edition | Professional | Lifetime License | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Time-limited evaluation | A small team that supports itself | Paid self-hosted use | Perpetual self-hosted use |
| Term | Offered as 60 days; the installation enforces the returned expiry | Offered as one year, renewable; the installation enforces the returned expiry | One year | No expiry |
| Workers | As returned for the key | Offered as two; the installation enforces the returned limit | As returned for the key | Unlimited |
| Activations | As returned for the key | As returned for the key | As returned for the key | Offered as four; the installation enforces the returned limit |
| Support | Read-only community, and email help with non-emergency pre-sales questions, both for the trial period | Community, read and write | Community, read and write, plus the support portal | Community, read and write, plus the support portal |
| Production use | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Trial is offered as 60 days. It is an evaluation entitlement, not a production one. It carries read-only access to the customer community and email help with non-emergency pre-sales questions, both only while the trial runs.
Free Edition is offered as yearly and renewable, with two workers. It carries full read and write access to the customer community, which is where its support happens — there is no support portal, no email channel, no service-level agreement, and no implementation, migration, or validation help. You own deployment, administration, continuity, and troubleshooting.
The 60-day Trial period, the one-year Free Edition term, and the two-worker figure are all commercial terms of the offer, stated in the Product License Agreement. They apply unless the licensing authority returns different approved claims for the key, and the installation enforces whatever it is given.
The worker limit is enforced, whatever its value. This is not a display-only figure. The installation checks the worker count before allowing a change, and an operation that would take the count over the limit — adding someone to a role that counts as a worker, adding a group membership, applying department access, or adding someone through single sign-on — is refused at that point. So "two workers" on a Free Edition key is a real ceiling: the third would-be worker is turned away, not merely noted. A Lifetime License is the exception — it carries no worker ceiling, and the Product License page shows its worker limit as Unlimited. See Limits and scope for how to free capacity when you hit it.
Professional is the paid annual path for self-hosted production use. The installation permits product use when a licence key is stored, the licensing authority reports a valid active entitlement for it, this installation holds current activation proof, and the worker count is within the returned limit. It carries the customer community and the support portal, described under Support.
Lifetime License is a one-time, perpetual entitlement offered to a limited group of founding customers. It carries Professional product use with no expiry and no worker ceiling. On the Product License page the edition reads Founder Lifetime Professional, the worker limit reads Unlimited, and the term reads No expiry for Founder Lifetime entitlement. A Lifetime key is issued only after the licensing authority approves it — a verified one-time payment, or an owner-approved grant — and it is not part of the annual subscription model. Its support matches Professional: the customer community and the support portal, described under Support.
Once a Lifetime key has been activated on an installation, that installation keeps full product use even when the Finlay.works licensing authority cannot be reached. It does not fall back to the time-limited grace window the other editions rely on when the authority is unavailable; the Product License page reports this state as Founder lifetime continuity active. This continuity is tied to the installation that was activated. It ends if the authority is reached and refuses the key — revoked, retired, inactive, invalid, unknown, not found, deactivated, or expired; if a System Administrator clears or deactivates the key on that installation; or if the installation is no longer the one that was activated. Re-establishing entitlement on a moved, reinstalled, or restored installation still contacts the licensing authority; this release does not carry a portable certificate that restores a Lifetime entitlement without it.
While that state is in force, the Product License page carries a Founder Lifetime boundary card, headed Activated-instance continuity only, which states the same limits on screen. It also states what the continuity is not: continuing to work offline implies nothing about support availability, uptime, corporate survival, source access, package availability, or any certification.
Support
Support is not part of the software. It is reached through your Finlay.works customer area, and what you get depends on your edition.
The customer community is a discussion site where you can ask questions, share operating experience, and follow product discussion with the Finlay.works team. Free Edition, Professional, and the Lifetime License all get full read and write access to it. A Trial can read it but not post.
The support portal is where you submit and track requests. Professional and the Lifetime License get it. Trial and Free Edition do not.
Email is offered during a Trial only, for non-emergency pre-sales questions.
Two boundaries hold across every edition. No response time is promised — not for the portal, not for the community, not for trial email. And support does not include implementation, migration, or validation work; those are yours, or a separate commercial arrangement.
The service-level agreement feature inside the product is a timer your own organization configures for its own tickets. It is not a commitment from Finlay.works, and configuring one creates no support entitlement. See Limits and scope.
Security in development
Security work is part of building this product rather than an exercise at the end of it.
- A change that affects how the product behaves at runtime carries a documented security and control review before it merges, recorded with the change in the product's own decision log.
- The authorization model and the audit-trail contract are maintained documents. Changes are checked against them, and changes that alter them update them.
- Product-security assessment uses OWASP guidance as its testing lens, and combines dependency review, source-assisted control review, bounded web application testing, and network vulnerability scanning.
- Findings are tracked and fixed like any other defect, and the fix carries its own review.
What that is not. It is not a certification of any kind. It is not an independent audit, and not a penetration test. It does not mean every input has been tested against every attack, or that the product is free of vulnerabilities. Assessment reduces uncertainty; it does not remove risk, and it says nothing about vulnerabilities discovered after it was done.
The point of stating this is narrow and worth being plain about: it tells you security was considered as the product was built, by people following a written process that leaves a record. It is not a substitute for your own assessment, and if your organization requires independent testing before deployment, you should carry that out.
What a customer package is
There are two package families, linux-compose and
windows-service. A customer download is an approved entry
from each family, from the same build run, agreeing on version, source,
channel, release date, licence terms, edition eligibility, support
boundary, and approval state — each with its own archive, checksum,
digest, and provenance record.
That is what you should receive, and what you should check what you received against. Downloads appear in your Finlay.works customer area against an active licence, and what is offered depends on your edition. Each artifact is listed with its version, channel, family, release date, and SHA-256 checksum.
What a licence does not settle
A key is not a package. A package is not entitlement. Entitlement is not access — an active licence grants no person any ticket, department, project, or administration authority. A payment record is none of the above.
Access is covered in Roles and access.