Simplifying Licensing for the Edge

If you have ever had to manage dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of distributed sites, you know how quickly things can get complicated, especially when it comes to licensing. Whether it's the licenses tied to CPU, node, or core counts, extra fees for specific features, or license keys that always seem to disappear from your inbox, the complexity adds up fast.

Built to Stay Simple

Tekkio was built to keep things simple. It focuses on the essential functions for the edge, making it easy to deploy. This focus extends to our licensing: Each cluster is covered by a single license that includes everything from fleet management to monitoring, which helps keep technical planning and financial forecasting predictable. The result is a solution that is easy-to-use, scalable, and unified, with a straightforward and fair licensing model to match the technical simplicity.

One Cluster, One License

No matter how many nodes, containers, or services you run, whether a cluster is running a full application suite or a set of lightweight services, the price stays the same. This per-cluster licensing keeps costs predictable, so your team knows exactly what adding new clusters will cost – with no unexpected fees. And as your business grows, adding new locations stays manageable: just deploy another cluster. Whether it’s your tenth site or your five hundredth, the model keeps scaling effortlessly.

Even better, when new workloads require an additional node or three, no additional licensing needs to be purchased! This further stabilizes your costs and makes your business predictable.

Flexible Licensing Editions

Tekkio offers three licensing editions: Standard, Enterprise, and Not-for-Profit – all offering the same full feature set. The difference is the subscription model, support, and your choice of management hub. Standard licenses are lower-cost subscriptions with a shared hub, hosted by Tekkio. The Enterprise edition adds additional flexibility with your choice of a shared hub hosted by Tekkio or two options that give your organization additional flexibility: In your cloud or on your premises. Both can take advantage of your existing network infrastructure and offer flexibility in configuration and maintenance windows. But no matter which edition, the experience stays unified and cost stays predictable.

Purpose-Built for the Edge

Tekkio is purpose-built for the middle ground between small business and massive datacenter: environments with multiple distributed sites that need a solution that actually works at their scale. At the edge, complexity is inevitable – licensing shouldn’t add to it.

The Hidden Cost of Legacy Models

Most legacy licensing models are based on the number of CPUs, memory size, node count, or other hardware specifications. This model works fine when your environment is centralized and relatively easy to inventory. But at the edge, hardware and requirements are typically more diverse, often leading to unnecessary licenses or inadvertently missed licenses. Across multiple locations, the cost of this shelfware adds up fast and if you ever underestimate your needs, audits can bring significant fines.

Imagine finally upgrading your hardware to run workloads more smoothly, and suddenly your license bill doubles. That’s the reality with per-core licensing and in many cases this is not avoidable. In years past, dual-core chips were available to lower your licensing costs. Today, even 4-core options are limited and CPU vendors are moving toward 8 or even 16 cores as the minimum.

Licensing That Scales With You

You shouldn’t have to worry about your licensing model every time you want to upgrade your infrastructure – be it hardware or software. Tekkio’s per-cluster model avoids that problem entirely. Whether you're upgrading hardware, scaling services, or adding new sites, the cost remains predictable. It’s a licensing approach designed for how edge environments actually work in real life.