License Management

This guide explains how to manage licenses for Upbound Crossplane (UXP), including how to generate, apply, download, and verify licenses for Commercial plans.

• Upbound Enterprise, and Business Critical are commercial plans that let you create license keys that unlock additional features in Upbound Crossplane

important

To generate a license key for Upbound Crossplane, contact your Upbound account representative.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure you have:

• a running Kubernetes cluster
• kubectl installed
• the up CLI installed
• a valid UXP license provided by Upbound
• Admin access for your organization in the Upbound Console (for Enterprise plans)

Community plan

The Community plan on Upbound lets you run Upbound Crossplane without a license. This lets you use the free core features of Upbound Crossplane.

Enable a development license

To generate a development license for local development on a single-node cluster, use the up CLI:

up uxp license apply --dev

Restrictions

Users can't provide Upbound Crossplane as a commercial Crossplane service to others.

Commercial plans

Users who have a commercial plan on Upbound may generate and install license keys. These commercial license keys unlock commercial-only features in Upbound Crossplane.

Commercial features

Commercial licenses unlock the following Upbound Crossplane features:

• Provider pod autoscaling
• Function pod scale-to-zero
• Backup and restore
• Access to patch releases of Official Providers

These features are unavailable unless a valid license is present.

License expiration

Upon license expiration, the cluster enter a grace period whereby features continue to work. The grace period is 25% of the total license duration. For example:

• A yearly license has a 3-month grace period
• A monthly license has about a 1-week grace period.

During this grace period:

• Commercial features continue to function normally
• UXP emits warnings to indicate the license's grace period is active
• Configuration of commercial features remains unchanged, allowing you to add a new license and continue using commercial features as before expiration.

After license expiration and grace period, paid features or components get locked down. This means any component checking the license sees that it's truly invalid (expired and grace period ended) and disables its paid features.

note

When licenses expires, your control plane still reconciles to guarantee your resources are operational. However, logs will appear in your control plane to ensure operators understand the license is past its expiration period.

Development licenses

When you deploy Upbound Crossplane into a local single-node kind cluster, it automatically receives a temporary license that unlocks commercial features. These development licenses enable local development and testing flows with Upbound Crossplane.

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This license may not be re-used for production purposes.

License management in the Upbound Console (Enterprise and above)

Organizations with Enterprise or higher tier plans have access to self-service license management in the Upbound Console.

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To manage your license in the Upbound Console, you must be an organization Admin.

List licenses

To list your organization's licenses, log in to your Upbound account and navigate to My Account > Manage Account in the top right corner of your console.

The list of licenses displays information about your UXP licenses like:

• License name
• Status (Active or Expired)
• Resources allocated per month
• Operations allocated per month
• Creation date
• Expiration date

You can also use the search bar to find licenses by name, status, or number of resources/operations allocated per month.

Download licenses

To download a license in your console, click the three dots in the license of your choice.

Click Download License. Your browser will download the license as a JSON file.

For more information, follow the Provisioning Instructions to see up-to-date documentation on how to apply the license to your Kubernetes cluster.

note

In the license file, the capacity field references resource hours rather than resource per month. Resource hours reflect the entire capacity allocated for the duration of the license instead of for a single month.

Controllers in clusters track Resource Hours for accuracy and precision. Because licenses apply to disconnected clusters that don't report back consumption metrics, the license must hold the entire capacity.

Create a new license

To create a new license in the console, click the Create button and fill out the necessary information.

Licenses require:

• License Name: A meaningful name to identify the license within the pool of licenses created. Use cluster names, regions, or meaningful identifiers that can help you later know to which control plane your license is tied.
• Expiration: The exact date when the license will expire. No expiration date can exceed your end contract with Upbound.
• Resources per Month: The maximum number of Resources the license can manage per month.
• Operations per Month: The maximum number of Operations the license can manage per month.

Click Create to provision your license. Once you submit your license request, Upbound bills your organization according to the resources/operations allocated and creates a JSON-formatted license file.

Download your license and follow the provisioning instructions to apply it to your control plane.

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For organizations without active contracts, your Create button is disabled and displays insights on why the operation isn't allowed.

Unless there are network errors or outages, the only reason you can't create a license is because your organization doesn't have a valid contract. Reach out to support or your account representative to coordinate provisioning.

Add a license to an Upbound Crossplane cluster

To enable commercial features in an Upbound Crossplane cluster, you need a commercial license.

Connect to your Upbound Crossplane cluster.

Download your license file and apply the license with the up CLI:

up uxp license apply /path/to/license.json

If you don't provide a license key, UXP runs the Community edition.

important

You may not re-use licenses across multiple Upbound Crossplane clusters.

Verify a license

Up CLI

Confirm your license status:

up uxp license show

It should print a result like the following:

Upbound Crossplane License Status:  Valid (The license signature has been successfully verified.)
Created:                            2025-07-15 08:30:21 -0400 EDT
Expires:                            2025-10-13 08:30:21 -0400 EDT

Plan:                 standard
Resource Hour Limit:  50000
Operation Limit:      5000
Enabled Features:
- LazyCRDLoading
- ProviderVPA
- BackupRestore

kubectl

Confirm your license status:

kubectl get license uxp

It should print a result like the following:

NAME   PLAN       VALID   REASON              AGE
uxp    standard   True    SignatureVerified   3h59m

License status information

For a detailed view, use kubectl to return the full resource YAML information:

kubectl get license uxp -o yaml

The status field provides more information about your license entitlements and current usage:

Field	Description
plan	The commercial plan associated with your license.
expiresAt	The date and time when your license is set to expire.
capacity	The total capacity granted by your license, such as resourceHours and operations.
enabledFeatures	A list of the commercial features unlocked by your license.
usage	The cumulative usage data tracked by the system, including utilization percentages.
conditions	Reports the real-time status, including LicenseValid and UsageCompliant conditions.
gracePeriodEndsAt	When the license grace period ends and the license becomes completely invalid.

For more information on usage metering, review the Usage Metering guide.