Both licenses have the same features, there is no functionality locked based on the license.
The difference between them is that the Indie license is an annually renewed license, while the Business license is a perpetual.
If your funding / annual revenue are under €200K you qualify for the Indie license, which comes at no cost. If you go above this limit you'll need to get a Business license.
A perpetual license is a license that you buy once and can keep using forever.
Ark's Business license comes with 1 year of free updates. After this period, the license enters what we call maintenance mode, which basically means that you can keep using any version released up to that date, but from now on if you want to use a newer version you'll need to renew your license.
Ark by default can run without any license, and limits it to 3 seats. To extend this limit, you'll need to request an Indie license.
Yes, a license can be used to setup any number of servers.
You can think of the license tied to a person / company, the only restriction is that the servers need to be for your use, and cannot be setup as a service for third parties.
No, a license is a file that you drop inside your server's folder.
To get extra seats for an existing license please contact licenses@ark-vcs.com.
In case of a Business license, you'll need to purchase extra seats. When acquiring extra seats you can opt to also extend your older seats with a pro-rata price, and your new license will now have another year of updates.
A seat is a slot used by a unique user currently connected to the server. If you have a license with 5 seats you can have 5 unique users connected at the same time.
If the same user connects multiple times it still only counts as using one seat.
This means that you don't actually have to worry about pruning old / inactive users, since if they don't connect to the server then they won't use any seats.
Not at this moment, but in the future there will be a concept of a guest user, which if setup will have read only permissions.
Yes, please contact us using the same e-mail you used when requesting / purchasing the license.
Yes, you please reach out and we'll provide one for you.
If you like Ark and want to continue supporting its development please consider donating.
Cloud servers will be hosted in Europe.
Besides any user you define, only we will have access to your server folder. We'll never access your server unless with explicit consent (e.g. help you with some issue you may have). A zip backup of your server folder will be created before any ark upgrades and kept, which you'll be able to get for your own backup / migration.
Upon request, the server will be stopped and the server folder zipped. You'll then get access to this zip and you can run the server yourself, for more information please check the documentation.