Announcing Licenseistic's public REST API

Licenseistic has always done double duty: it's a standalone WordPress plugin for managing license keys on your own commercial plugins and themes, and it's also the entitlements engine that WPistic runs on internally — the same system that decides whether your Chatbotistic subscription is active grants a valid Licenseistic activation. Today we're opening up the REST API that powers that second use case to every Licenseistic customer.

Concretely, that means you can now issue, validate, and revoke license keys for your own software from your own systems — a checkout flow, an internal admin tool, a migration script — without going through the Licenseistic wp-admin screen by hand. The API covers the same operations the plugin's own update-checker and activation flow use, so there's no second-class 'API version' of the licensing logic that behaves differently from the UI.

The most requested use case, by a wide margin, was bulk issuance during a migration off a homegrown or third-party license server. If you're moving from a custom-built system, you can script the import: create the license records via the API, backfill activation history, and cut your update-checker endpoint over to Licenseistic without asking every customer to re-activate manually.

Per-domain activation limits and self-service deactivation — the two features customers ask for most — are both exposed through the API, not just the admin UI. A customer moving a plugin from a staging domain to production can deactivate their old activation themselves, through your own account portal if you build one on top of the API, rather than emailing your support inbox.

The API also reacts to the same Memberistic plan-change events that drive entitlements internally, if you're running Memberistic alongside Licenseistic. A membership upgrade or downgrade can grant, suspend, or revoke a license automatically — the exact mechanism that keeps a WPistic customer's own product access in sync when they change plans, now available for your product's licenses too.

Documentation and API keys are available from the Licenseistic settings screen for anyone on a paid plan. If you're issuing licenses for your own plugin or theme business today through a custom server, we'd genuinely like to hear about your migration — reach out to support and we'll help you plan the cutover.