The e-commerce stack iLok was waiting for

If your audio software is protected with PACE/iLok, your licensing is sorted. The iLok Licensing Platform has been the industry's standard for two decades, and for good reason: it is robust, customers know it, and it works. The problem is rarely the licensing.

The problem is everything around it.

A typical setup looks like this. iLok handles licenses. A generic payment provider (Shopify, FastSpring, WooCommerce, whatever the team picked back when the catalogue was three plugins) handles checkout and orders. A marketing tool like Mailchimp, Klaviyo or Mailerlite handles the newsletter. Three systems, three customer lists, none of them quite agreeing on who owns what or who tried what. Holding it all together is a fragile collection of custom integrations, CSV exports, manual tagging, and a spreadsheet someone updates on Friday afternoons.

That is the duct tape. And it is what we just took out.

Moonbase now natively integrates with iLok

For audio software companies that have built on iLok, this is the piece of the stack that has been missing: an e-commerce platform that treats your iLok licenses as first-class data, not as a system to wire up after the fact.

Moonbase handles checkout, subscriptions, and taxes. It also handles license deposits, trials, third-party code redemptions, and ownership data, all synced bidirectionally with iLok and pushed into whichever marketing tool you already use. One platform. One source of truth about who your customers are, what they own, and what they have tried.

Why this matters: ownership data unlocks the customers you already have

The customers most likely to buy your next product are the ones who bought your last one. A generic e-commerce stack cannot tell you who they are.

That is the gap. A license tells you a customer activated a product. It does not tell you which campaign brought them in, which trial they abandoned three months ago, or which complementary plugin would be the obvious next thing to put in front of them. Those answers live in your store and your marketing tool, not in iLok. And on a typical stack, none of those systems agree on the same customer.

When licensing, e-commerce, and marketing each live in their own silo, the cost is not the busywork of moving CSVs around. The cost is the campaigns you cannot run because the data is not where it needs to be:

• The new release announcement that should have gone to everyone who owns a related product, but only went to the general newsletter list.
• The trial re-engagement flow that should have triggered seven days after a deposit, but never fired because nobody told the marketing tool a trial happened.
• The loyalty discount on Product B for everyone who already owns Product A, straightforward in concept, surprisingly hard to actually run when ownership is locked inside a system that does not talk to your store.

Here is what closing that gap looks like. Nextmidi has built its brand on respect for its customers and a drive to reward loyalty. When they launched Divisimate Micro in the summer of 2024, they used Moonbase's targeted discounts to offer every existing Divisimate customer a personal discount on the new product. That single campaign drove over 30% of the launch revenue, and reinforced a fanbase that was already inclined to come back. None of it required CSV exports, manual tagging, or a spreadsheet. The audience already existed in Moonbase, with current ownership data, ready to be reached.

A 30% lift on a launch is not a marketing optimisation. It is the kind of compounding advantage that, release after release, separates audio software companies that grow from the ones that stay flat.

What ownership data unlocks on the storefront

Because Moonbase is the same system handling e-commerce and licensing, ownership data is not just a marketing input. It changes what your storefront can actually do, and what kinds of products you can credibly sell.

Subscriptions and rent-to-own. A high-priced sample library or flagship synth converts at a much higher rate when customers can pay monthly toward a permanent iLok-protected license, instead of a single upfront charge. The price ceiling on your catalogue is no longer set by what a customer is willing to put on their card in one go.

Partial bundle purchases. The customer who already owns three of your five plugins should not have to email support to buy the bundle, and should not be quietly overpaying for the ones they own twice. Moonbase knows what they own, so the bundle re-prices itself at checkout. They get the discount they expect. You stop losing those carts to confusion.

Upgrade and cross-grade pricing, gated by real ownership. The customer who already owns the standard version of a synth gets the upgrade price for the pro version, automatically, on the same site they bought the original on. No coupon to copy, no support ticket, no honour-system form asking them to confirm what they own. Moonbase checks iLok and the right price appears.

Loyalty pricing and targeted discounts. Any segment you can describe in terms of product ownership is a segment you can price for. The release that goes out at full price to the general list and at a loyalty price to existing customers stops being a quarterly heroics project and becomes a checkbox at launch.

These are the mechanics that move revenue. They are also the mechanics that are nearly impossible to run reliably when licensing lives in one system and your store lives in another, with the marketing tool guessing at what either of them know. The cost of that fragmentation is not the integration work. It is the products you cannot price, the bundles you cannot offer, and the customers you cannot reach with the right thing at the right time.

Every license event, in the right marketing tool, automatically

Moonbase syncs to Mailchimp, Brevo, Mailerlite and the other major marketing tools, enriched with product-level ownership and trial data, not just an email and a tag.

Consider a typical trial flow: a prospective customer downloads a 14-day trial of Product C. The trial deposit lands on iLok, and the trial event flows into your marketing tool the same moment. Day three, they have not activated, so they get a nudge. Day twelve, the trial is ending soon, here is a discount if they convert now. Day thirty, the trial expired without conversion, here is a reminder with a different angle.

None of this is new in concept. What is new is that you do not have to wire any of it together. The trial flows competitors are running today, and the ones you have probably written down somewhere and never shipped, become the default behaviour of your stack.

What it looks like for your customers

The integration uses iLok's official OAuth flow, so credentials never touch your site. When a customer creates an account on your storefront, they connect iLok in a single step, every license they hold from your products is mirrored into Moonbase, and every license you deposit going forward syncs automatically: purchases, trials, third-party code redemptions, all of it.

The same OAuth connection also gives you authenticated user credentials you can pass into your own install manager or companion tools, if you have built any, so product activation can feel as connected on your side as it does on iLok's.

Migrating an existing catalogue

If you are moving to Moonbase from another e-commerce stack, the integration also imports the existing licenses of any customer who connects their iLok account. That removes most of the pain of bringing an existing customer base over: no manual mapping, no asking customers to re-enter what they already own, no awkward gap where the new system does not yet know who anyone is.

The stack catches up

iLok solved licensing a long time ago. The rest of the stack, the e-commerce platform, the customer database, the marketing tool, the threads tying them together, is what is catching up now.

If your products are on iLok and you are running an audio software company, get in touch. We will help you map out the move, including pulling in the existing iLok licenses of every customer who reconnects.

Learn more in our docs on our iLok integration.