Activating Pro

This guide walks through activating Pro on an installed Vectis server. You should have your Vectis Mail Pro subscription details from ValidonX before starting.

Activation at a glance

1. Get your subscription details from ValidonX — license key + tenant ID.
2. Open the License page in the Vectis admin UI.
3. Activate by pasting the license key and tenant ID, then clicking Activate.
4. Verify the gates flipped by checking that Pro features (analytics, OIDC SSO, advanced spam) are now accessible.

What activation does

By default, Vectis runs in Starter (Free) mode — up to 3 domains, up to 25 mailboxes per domain, and the full set of mail-platform features (webmail, sending API, monitoring, backups). Pro features are gated until the server is registered with ValidonX.

Activating Pro:

• Removes the 3-domain and 25-mailbox-per-domain caps (becomes unlimited).
• Unlocks the per-domain analytics dashboard.
• Unlocks OIDC SSO for the admin UI.
• Enables priority email support tickets.
• No mail downtime — features unlock immediately, no service restart.

One subscription, many installs

Pro is billed at $29 USD per tenant per month, where a tenant is your organisation’s account on ValidonX. A single subscription authorises all Vectis installs operated by your organisation — production, staging, multi-region, branch deployments. You activate each Vectis install by pasting the same four credentials on its License page; the ValidonX service_key and tenant_id are shared across them.

If your deployment shape is “one Vectis server”, the subscription covers it as expected. If you run multiple Vectis installs under the same business, you still only pay one subscription. Per-install license scoping (so a single compromised install can be revoked without impacting the rest) is on the v0.1.x roadmap.

Step 1 — Get your subscription details

After completing checkout on ValidonX, your subscription dashboard will display the four fields Vectis needs:

• Subscription ID — identifies your active Pro plan.
• Tenant ID — your customer-account identifier in ValidonX. One tenant covers every Vectis install operated by your organisation.
• Service Key — a per-tenant authentication key. Treat as a secret; it authenticates all your organisation’s Vectis installs to ValidonX. (Per-install scoping is on the v0.1.x roadmap.)
• Server ID (optional) — a unique label for this specific install, used in usage telemetry to distinguish multiple Vectis installs running under the same subscription. If left blank, Vectis defaults to the configured hostname.

The base URL defaults to https://api.validonx.com and only needs to be overridden if Veltara Works has issued you a different endpoint.

Step 2 — Open the License page

In your Vectis admin UI:

1. Sign in as a super admin account (the one created during install).
2. From the left-hand sidebar, click License. The page is only visible to super admins.
3. The current state will read FREE — Unconfigured.

Step 3 — Activate

1. Click Activate Pro / Enterprise.
2. Paste each of the four fields from your ValidonX dashboard into the corresponding input.
3. Click Activate.

The server validates the credentials against ValidonX in real time. If the subscription is active and the credentials match, the page reloads showing PRO — active, the masked subscription ID, the cached-entitlement expiry, and the days of grace remaining if ValidonX becomes unreachable.

If activation fails, the response body explains why — common cases are typo’d service key, an expired or cancelled subscription on the ValidonX side, or temporary ValidonX unreachability. Vectis itself remains in Starter mode until activation succeeds.

Step 4 — Verify the gates flipped

A quick sanity check after activation:

• The Domains page no longer caps creation at 3.
• The /api/v1/analytics endpoint returns data instead of 403.
• The OIDC login redirect flows to your provider rather than returning an upgrade-required error.

The cached entitlements refresh automatically as the orchestrator polls ValidonX. The first refresh after activation is immediate; subsequent checks happen periodically and on demand via the Re-validate now button on the License page.

Offline grace period

Vectis caches entitlements in Postgres. If ValidonX becomes unreachable (network outage, ValidonX maintenance) Vectis keeps Pro features running through your current paid period (the license’s paid-through date) while it retries refreshes in the background. Past that point without a successful refresh, Pro endpoints return LICENSE_EXPIRED until the server can reach ValidonX again.

This means a Vectis install survives ValidonX outages within the paid period without disrupting mail delivery (which is never gated) or Pro features (which keep working until the paid-through date).

Cancelling or moving to a different subscription

To remove an active subscription:

1. Open the License page.
2. Click Remove license.
3. Confirm in the dialog.

The server reverts immediately to Starter mode. Existing data is preserved — domains, mailboxes, and aliases beyond the Free-tier caps remain in place and operational. Only the creation of new resources past the Starter limits is blocked from that point.

Because one tenant subscription covers all your Vectis installs, you do not need to remove the licence to bring up a second install — just paste the same four credentials on the new server’s License page and it activates as Pro under the same subscription. To fully retire an install, run Remove license on the old server before decommissioning it.

Activating via secrets.yaml (advanced / scripted)

For fully automated deploys you can pre-populate ValidonX credentials in /etc/vectis/secrets.yaml:

validonx:
  base_url: https://api.validonx.com
  service_key: ""
  tenant_id: ""
  subscription_id: ""
  server_id: ""
  license_key: ""

When the API container starts, it reads the validonx_config DB row first (set by the License page), falling through to secrets.yaml. Either source provides the credentials; the DB takes precedence when both are populated.

For most deployments the admin UI flow is the recommended path.

About license_key

license_key is the ValidonX-issued license string for your install. ValidonX issues license keys as separate cryptographic strings under each subscription, and the value is sent on the wire to ValidonX’s licensing-resolve endpoint so the server can locate the right license row inside your tenant.

It is operator-only — paste it into /etc/vectis/secrets.yaml once at install time or post-checkout, alongside the other validonx fields. The admin UI License page does not prompt for it (because it’s not the kind of value an admin should rotate from a browser session).

If you ever need to find the value again, it’s available on your ValidonX dashboard under your subscription’s “License keys” section.