Licensing applies to Pro only. The free build has no licence screen, because there is nothing to license.
Activating
Cart Presets → License. Paste the key from your purchase email and click Activate. Once active the screen shows your plan, the expiry date, how many of your activations are in use, and when the licence was last checked.What a licence buys
Updates and support. Not the right to keep running what you already have. This is worth being explicit about, because plugins differ on it:When your licence expires, the plugin carries on working exactly as installed. Nothing switches off. Nothing is deleted. No setting stops applying. You stop receiving new versions until you renew.
What is sent, and when
Your licence key and site URL go to the licensing service to activate, to verify periodically, and to check for updates. It runs from wp-admin and cron only. Your storefront never reaches it, so a customer browsing your shop never triggers a licence check. The key is never written to a log, never returned in an API response, and never shown in a notice.Updates
With an active licence, Pro updates appear on your Plugins screen like any other plugin. Update in place; your presets, items and settings are database rows and are untouched by the swap. WordPress checks for updates on its own schedule — roughly twice a day, more often while you are sitting on the Updates screen.The licence notice
Without an active licence you get a dismissible warning — once inside the CartPresets panel, styled to match it, and once as a standard WordPress notice elsewhere in wp-admin. They are one message, not two. Dismissing either dismisses both, and it stays dismissed for that licence state. If the state changes — an expiry, a detached site — it returns, because it is now telling you something new. The notice leads with what stopped and closes with what did not, because the true answer to my licence lapsed is that almost nothing changed.Licence states
In all four, every Pro feature keeps working.
Moving a site
Staging and production count as separate activations. If you are out of activations:1
Deactivate on the site you are leaving
Cart Presets → License → Deactivate.
2
Activate on the new one
Paste the same key.
For developers
cartpresets_update_manifest_url changes where a site looks for its release manifest. Point it elsewhere to run a pre-release channel, or return an empty string to switch automatic updates off for that site entirely.
The licence is checked before the manifest is fetched, so the filter changes which release a licensed site is offered rather than bypassing licensing. See the hooks reference.