How licensing works

What a licence gates

A licence gates two things: making new translations, and adding an AI provider. That is the whole list.

It does not gate serving translations that already exist, the language switcher, the strings screen, editing by hand, hreflang, sitemaps or the settings. Somebody whose licence lapses keeps their translated site, in every language, working exactly as it did.

• Gated: creating new translations, adding or changing a provider key
• Never gated: serving existing translations, the switcher, editing, SEO output

One key, as many sites as the plan allows

Activating a key binds it to the domain it was activated on. How many domains one key may hold at once is what a plan buys: one site, five, or as many as you like. Past that, the next activation is refused until a domain is released.

That is enforced on the server, not in the plugin, so copying the plugin folder does not copy the licence.

www and the bare domain are the same site. So are http and https, and any port or path. Staging on a different hostname is a different site, so it takes a slot.

The check

The plugin asks wpglotty.com about the licence roughly twice a day, on WordPress cron, and caches the answer. Nothing asks during a page render.

The answer is one of three shapes, and the third is the important one: a decision, a complaint that the request was malformed, or the server admitting it is having a bad day. On the last, the plugin changes nothing and carries on with what it last knew.

What the check sends

The key, the domain, the plugin version, the WordPress version, and counts: how many strings exist, how many are translated, how many words went to a provider, what that cost, and which models did the work.

Never the strings themselves, never a translation, never a URL beyond the domain the licence is already bound to, and nothing about any person. The counts are what you see on your own account page.