Editions and Licensing

UmbSocial comes in three editions.

• Free. Free to use, and closed source (it is not open source). No licence key is needed.
• Pro and Agency. Paid editions, licensed through UmbHost. They are available from UmbHost.

Comparison

Feature	Free	Pro	Agency
Queue, scheduling, per-channel text, history	Yes	Yes	Yes
Channels	3	Unlimited	Unlimited
Posting schedule	One, shared	Per channel	Per channel
User-group permissions	Yes	Yes	Yes
Approval workflow	No	Yes	Yes
Draft and rewrite with Claude (Umbraco.AI)	No	Yes	Yes
Drafts created by automations	No	Yes	Yes
Published history	90 days	Unlimited, CSV export	Unlimited, CSV export
Production domains	n/a	1	Unlimited
Development and staging domains	Any	Development licence	Development licence

The paid features come in separate paid packages. The free edition is complete on its own.

The free edition’s limits

The limits are compiled into UmbSocial. They aren’t read from configuration or from a replaceable service, so a site can’t change them by setting a value or registering its own implementation.

3 channels

• A channel counts towards the limit until it is removed. A disabled channel still counts.
• Adding a fourth channel is refused with the code channel.limit. Removing a channel frees its place.

When a licence lapses

If a paid licence expires or is cancelled and the site has more than 3 channels, nothing is deleted:

• The first 3 channels (in their sort order) carry on publishing.
• The other channels are paused. Their unsent posts wait with the status Paused (the target’s error reads licence.channel_limit).
• A post that goes to both kinds of channel still goes out on the channels that aren’t paused.
• New posts can’t be scheduled to a paused channel (channel.paused).
• When the allowance returns (the licence is renewed, or channels are removed until the paused one is within the first 3), paused posts carry on automatically. A post whose time has passed while it was paused goes out at the next check.

Published history

The free edition shows 90 days of history. A finished post (Published, Partly failed or Failed) is hidden from every list and read once it is more than 90 days old. The 90 days count from when the post was published or, for a post that never fully published, from when it was last saved.

Hidden history is also encrypted in the database, so it can’t be read there either:

• Once an hour, the server that sends posts seals the finished posts that have passed the 90 days. Each post’s content (its text, link, image, alt text, and each channel’s text, live URL, network id and error) is encrypted with a new AES-256-GCM key, and that key is encrypted with UmbHost’s RSA public key, which is in the package. The plain content is then blanked.
• Only the licensed Pro package holds the private key, so only it can restore sealed posts, while its licence is active.
• Sealing runs even where publishing is switched off, and there is no setting to switch it off.
• A sealed post can’t be edited, retried or marked as published (post.sealed).
• Posts are never deleted by the history window.

A licensed site seals nothing.

Note

Drafts and scheduled posts are never hidden or sealed, however old they are. Only finished posts are.

Installing a licence

Install the paid package and add your licence key to the UmbSocial section, preferably in your environment’s secrets or environment variables rather than appsettings.json:

"UmbHost": {
  "Social": {
    "LicenseKey": "YOUR LICENCE KEY HERE"
  }
}

As an environment variable: UmbSocial__LicenseKey.

You are also required to set UmbracoApplicationUrl, which images need anyway.

UmbSocial has its own licence. A licence for another UmbHost product, such as UmbCheckout, doesn’t count, and the two can run on the same site, each with its own key.

Development licences

For a staging or QA site, ask UmbHost for a development licence. It covers the non-production domains listed on it. It mustn’t be used to run the live site.

Remember that a staging site doesn’t post at all unless you switch publishing on there.