Licensing

Every Craft Cloud Pro or Team plan includes a license to run the corresponding version of Craft.

Your license is valid as long as your Cloud project is active, and includes the same support as a self-hosted installation. There is nothing to manage or renew, and the license lifecycle (opens new window) remains effectively the same:

  • Your development environment is issued a key the first time it phones home (opens new window);
  • Plugins you install while working on the site have their trial licenses tied to that key;
  • When you eventually go live on Cloud, your plugin licenses are annotated with the Cloud project;

Administrators will only see a license resolution banner (opens new window) in public environments, when there is an issue with a plugin. While running on Cloud, preexisting keys (stored in config/license.key or in the CRAFT_LICENSE_KEY environment variable) are ignored; instead, we validate the installation using your project’s internal ID. Even though the key file is not used for verifying the Craft license, we recommend keeping it with the project, so that its plugin licenses remain connected.

#Changing Editions

If you need to switch editions, please contact the support team.

After your plan has been adjusted, make the corresponding edition change in a local environment, commit the project config changes, and redeploy each of the project’s environments.

It is possible to deploy a project with mismatched editions, but the cloud/up command will return an error.

#Plugins

Cloud does not cover first- or third-party plugin licenses. You are still responsible for purchasing any commercial plugins when your project goes live.

The first time an admin logs in to the control panel from a public domain (opens new window), they should see a prompt to resolve any outstanding licensing issues. If not, use the

  1. Utilities
  2. Clear Caches
screen to clear all caches, log out, and log in again.

#Development

Craft is free to evaluate during development, and in staging environments (on or off Cloud). You do not need an active Cloud subscription to begin development, but we recommend starting a seven-day trial (opens new window) to get familiar with the platform.

#Existing Licenses

If you are migrating a project to Cloud that was already licensed, your Craft and plugin licenses will remain connected.

To reuse the Craft license on another project, you should first eject any associated plugin licenses by releasing and re-claiming (opens new window) them. You may then re-associate them with a “trial” license in development, or allow them to float within the project’s Console user or organization.

#Support

When contacting support about Craft issues, please include your Cloud project’s handle and/or domain. This will allow us to look up information about your environment and the version of Craft (and any plugins) you are using.