Traefik Hub Licensing
This document provides information about licensing.
Request a Free Trial License
If you're interested in trying out Traefik Hub, head over to our signup page and request a free 14-day trial license.
What's Included
All features of Traefik Hub are available for 14 days without any limitations.
Is a Credit/Debit Card Required for the Free Trial?
A credit/debit card is not required for the 14-day free trial.
How Can I Track the Remaining Time of My Trial?
Once your trial license is activated, you will see a counter in the dashboard, displaying how many days are left.
What Happens When the Trial License Expires?
After the trial period, the workspace will be locked, and no changes can be made to it anymore. Your account will not be lost after your free trial expires, you will still be able to log into your Traefik Hub account to view your dashboard.
To continue using Traefik Hub after your free trial, you can purchase a license.
How to Get a License
The Traefik Labs team will unlock your Traefik Hub workspace(s), where you can collaborate with your colleagues on your API initiatives.
Managing Your Licenses
Your Traefik Hub license is managed by the Traefik Labs team based on your entitlements and contracts. License entitlements are reflected in the tokens used by your Traefik Hub gateways.
A license and a gateway token are separate concepts:
- License: your commercial subscription with Traefik Labs. Renewal is a sales conversation. See Updating Your License. If it lapses, a 30-day grace period applies before access is cut off. See Behavior After License Expiration.
- Gateway token: the credential your gateways use to authenticate. Each token is valid for 1 year, and the teams operating the gateways rotate it. See Token Expiration.
Updating Your License
Contact your sales engineer or our sales team to renew your license at the end of the licensed period. The Traefik Labs team handles the renewal.
You don't need to change your application configuration or your gateways. Existing tokens stay valid until their own expiration date. See Token Expiration.
Increasing Your License
If you want to increase your licensed amounts (for example, the number of Nodes or Replicas), please get in touch with your sales engineer or our sales team.
Tokens carry the features included in your license when they were issued. If your license gains a feature, rotate your gateway tokens to pick it up.
What Happens When the License Expires?
Traefik Hub workspace licenses have an expiration date. If a license isn't renewed by the end of its grace period, access to your Traefik Hub workspace is cut off and online gateways stop. It's important to understand how license expiration affects your Traefik Hub deployment.
License Expiration Notifications
30 days before the license expires, a counter appears in the top left corner of the Traefik Hub dashboard to show a countdown of the remaining days of the licensed period, along with a link to get in touch with the sales team.
15 days before the license expires, both you and our sales team will receive an email notification to discuss the situation and plan for renewal if needed.
Behavior After License Expiration
When a license expires and isn't renewed, a 30-day grace period begins.
- During the grace period: gateways keep operating normally, the workspace stays accessible, and you receive notifications to renew. You can still rotate gateway tokens.
- After the grace period: the Traefik Hub dashboard workspace is locked and no modifications are possible. You can no longer rotate gateway tokens. Online gateways stop serving traffic at their next check-in, within 24 hours, and don't start again until the license is renewed.
To restore access, renew your license with the sales team. No configuration is lost.
How Do You Control Licensing?
By default, Traefik Hub is licensed based on the number of Nodes hosting the services behind the APIs, but we're open to negotiating other terms if they better suit your use case.
The reporting is done by the Traefik Hub gateways connected to the Traefik Hub platform.
License Check Frequency
Traefik Hub checks your license status every 24 hours. If your gateways are online, they receive status updates directly from the Traefik Hub platform.
Downtime Tolerance
Traefik Hub gateways keep serving traffic during a Traefik Hub platform outage or network interruption, whether they run online or offline.
Online gateways validate their license by contacting the platform, but tolerate the platform being unreachable indefinitely without impacting traffic:
- On startup, the gateway starts serving traffic immediately, even if the platform cannot be reached, and keeps retrying license validation in the background. This doesn't apply to gateways with API Management enabled, see the note below.
- Once connected, the gateway checks in with the platform every 24 hours. If the platform becomes temporarily unreachable, the gateway keeps serving traffic and keeps retrying indefinitely.
If you are using the API Management features of Traefik Hub on an online gateway, the gateway must be able to reach the Traefik Hub platform when it starts. If the platform is unreachable at startup, the gateway doesn't start.
A running gateway stops only when the platform explicitly refuses it, for example because the license is past its grace period, required features are missing, or the token is already in use elsewhere. A platform outage or network interruption doesn't stop it.
Downtime tolerance covers only the platform being unreachable. It doesn't extend the grace period that applies after a license expires, and it doesn't extend a token's expiration date. See Token Expiration.
This section describes online gateways. Offline gateways never contact the Traefik Hub platform, so platform connectivity does not affect them. See Install Hub Gateway in Offline Mode for offline behavior and token management.
What Data Are Shared between the Traefik Hub Platform and the Kubernetes Cluster(s)
Please read our data sharing page to learn what data is shared in online mode.
If you have any questions about licensing, do not hesitate to contact your sales engineer or by sending an email to [email protected].
