The Licensing page in the SoAI WebUI reports the declaration and entitlement that the running installation is enforcing, and it is an operational view rather than a substitute for the accepted license or entitlement certificate. Read License and legal before making a licensing decision.
Open Licensing and read the summary
Select the Settings button at the right of the header, choose Settings, then open
the Licensing tab, which is available only to an Administrator with
Licensing administration
(LICENSING_ADMIN).
Deployment license shows the current status, the edition and version, when the license was accepted and the fingerprint of the accepted document, when the current declaration took effect, and the declaration itself with any verified entitlement beside it. A deployment holding an entitlement also shows its environment, licensed capabilities, and deployment allowances, together with the included support hours when the entitlement records them. A fixed-term or continuity entitlement adds its effective time and term boundaries, while a perpetual entitlement shows no term rows because it has none.
A Restart SoAI item with an Open Power control appears when licensing is ready but the process started with limited services, which happens after a recovery that succeeded on a process that had started in a restricted state. SoAI records that restart requirement itself, so the notification stays until the process restarts.
When licensing restricts the instance
Several recorded states hold the instance in a repair plane: an expired evaluation or commercial term, a suspended or
terminated entitlement, an entitlement whose signature, binding, or contract does not validate, a system clock that
has moved more than 5 minutes behind the last verified time, and a deployment that has accepted the license but has
no usable declaration or entitlement yet. In that condition SoAI answers ordinary requests with 403 and
licensing_restricted, so inference, chat, model and plugin administration, configuration changes,
updates, the terminal, and the compatible API all refuse work.
What stays available is what recovery needs: signing in, notifications, cancelling a request, Power, Backup, reading models, plugins, hardware, logs, and system status, reading Files, and the Licensing page itself. Recovering the instance means correcting the licensing state rather than restarting into it. An entitlement within 7 days of its term end reports an expiring status, which warns without restricting anything.
Declare how the deployment is used
During Core setup, the wizard shows the controlling license with its fingerprint, then asks how the deployment will be used. Personal use is the only choice you can select, and Organization or commercial use stays visible but disabled because commercial licenses and organization evaluations are not currently being issued. Choose Personal use only when the deployment satisfies the personal-use terms shown in the wizard, then confirm the attestation, and if the disabled choice describes the deployment, do not declare Personal Use to get past the step. Contact info@soai.to for licensing information.
SoAI Core under a Personal Use declaration needs no entitlement, while SoAI OS and any organization declaration require one, so the page follows the recorded state and a delivered entitlement shows different controls from a new Personal Use installation. Change license type moves the declaration afterwards, and the direction back to Personal Use retires the active entitlement, which is also why the organization direction stays disabled on a personal deployment.
Manage an entitlement
- License and Accept license appear while the current license document has not been accepted, and acceptance records the exact version and fingerprint shown.
- Activate license appears once the license is accepted on a deployment that needs an entitlement and has none. The button stays disabled until you enter a key of at least 16 characters, accepting the governing documents is part of the action, and an organization declaration also asks for the deployment environment.
- Convert to commercial, Convert to organization OS evaluation, Revert OS evaluation to personal use, Change deployment environment, and Retrieve renewed term appear only under an organization or commercial declaration whose entitlement supports online maintenance, and each one also depends on the current entitlement type and product.
- A deployment activated from an offline certificate has no online maintenance, so those controls and Deactivate deployment do not appear for it.
A disabled control is not permission to bypass the WebUI restriction.
Recover or move an entitlement
Reconcile activation appears when the last operation's outcome is unknown, which is the case when its response was lost rather than refused. SoAI already retries such an operation in the background on a widening delay and cancels a merely prepared operation at the next start, so use the control when you want that attempt made now.
Export offline request and Import offline certificate appear once the license is
accepted on a deployment that requires an entitlement and no other licensing operation is running. Export downloads
soai-offline-activation-request-v1.json, and Import accepts the returned .soailicense
certificate. Keep both files with the deployment they were created for, because the certificate is bound to that
deployment's identity.
Deactivate deployment appears only when the entitlement supports online maintenance. Choose
Rehost, Retired, Disaster recovery, or Other as
the fixed reason. Deactivation releases the authority binding and replaces the local deployment identity, so
reactivation or recovery is required before that entitlement can be used again; back up required data first and do
not repeat a request whose outcome is still being reconciled. Licensing attempts are limited per client address, and
6 online operations in 600 seconds is the point where SoAI answers with 429 instead of contacting the
licensing service, so read the error on a failed attempt rather than retrying in a loop.
The licensing state lives in the primary database, and the deployment's private key is stored encrypted with the installation encryption key. Both are default backup targets, and restore validates them as a pair, refusing a backup that carries one without the other or that was written by the other edition. Keep both targets enabled if you want a backup you can recover an entitlement from, as described in Backup.
Privacy and outage behavior
A licensing request carries the instance identifier, the deployment identity and its public key, a random nonce, the SoAI version, and the fields the selected action needs, such as the product key, the deployment environment, or the identifier, version, fingerprint, and acceptance time of each governing document. Each request is signed with the key pair created for this deployment and goes only to soai.to. Requests do not include prompts, model content, files, credentials, hardware fingerprints, or usage statistics. The identifiers and acceptance records that a request does send are used only to issue and maintain that entitlement, and they are never sold, shared with an advertiser, mined, or used to train a model.
Entitlement validation is local after activation and SoAI runs no licensing heartbeat, so a licensing-service outage
does not by itself invalidate a valid local entitlement, and the background recovery worker contacts the service
only while an operation is still unresolved. With
SYSTEM.RUNTIME.STAY_OFFLINE
enabled, online licensing actions fail like other public calls, so use the offline export and import path instead.
See Privacy and data handling for the complete boundary.