Question

I have coded a pretty nice class and I’d like to install it on the clients server without risking them taking the code and not paying me.

If possible, a method where I have the “key” on my server, and encrypt the source code on the clients server with that key and some how code the method for retrieving the key from my server into it, so in the event they don’t pay I can change the key on my end thus disabling the code from working on their end.

Any ideas?

EDIT: I’m aware of zend and ioncube, I’m trying to see if there is a different, less expensive “free”, way of doing this.

Answer 1

You could do something like this in a file included by all the others:

if (file_get_contents('http://your.domain.com/getKey.php') != 'verySecretCode')
{
    die('pay me');
}

And then you’d have to encode the file with Zend Guard or similar.

Your server needs to be online 24/7 otherwise you’ll have problems (or you could code a more robust system). Either way, for every request the server of your client will make a HTTP request to your server.

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Zend Guard is the best, but if you don’t have any money to spend you could try bcompiler.