The Studio Guide

Getting Started

If you manage software licenses for a team -- whether that is a music production house, a VFX facility, a game studio, or a post-production shop -- a studio account gives you centralized control over every seat, every activation, and every invoice. This guide walks through the entire process from account creation to workstation deployment.

Studio Account vs. Individual Account

An individual account is tied to one person. One login, one billing profile, licenses purchased for personal use. A studio account is an organization-level container. It has its own billing profile, a team dashboard, and the ability to hold licenses that are assigned to members rather than owned by them. When someone leaves, their licenses stay with the studio.

Choose a studio account if any of the following apply:

• You are purchasing licenses on behalf of other people.
• You need consolidated invoicing for accounting or procurement.
• You want to reassign licenses when team members change roles or leave.
• You need visibility into which machines have activated which products.

What You Get With A Studio Account

• Team dashboard. A single view of every member, every license assignment, and every active machine.
• Seat management. Add and remove team members without affecting license ownership. Licenses belong to the studio, not the individual.
• Shared billing. One payment method, one invoice stream. No chasing reimbursements from individual team members.
• Volume pricing. Automatic discounts at volume thresholds. The more seats you purchase for a given product, the lower the per-seat cost.

To create a studio account, sign up at archergate.io/login and select "Studio" as the account type during onboarding. You will be the initial admin. You can add more admins later.

Inviting Your Team

Once your studio account exists, the next step is bringing your team in. Every person who needs to activate software on their workstation needs to be a member of your studio.

Sending Invites

From the team dashboard, enter the email address of the person you want to invite and select their role. They will receive an email with a link to join your studio. If they already have an individual Archergate account, their account merges into the studio. If they are new, they create an account during the invite flow.

You can invite people one at a time or paste a list of email addresses for bulk invites. Each invite is valid for 14 days. You can resend or revoke pending invites from the dashboard at any time.

Roles: Admin vs. Member

There are two roles in a studio account:

• Admin. Full access to the team dashboard. Can invite and remove members, purchase licenses, assign and revoke seats, view all activations, manage billing, and export reports. You should have at least two admins so access is not lost if one person is unavailable.
• Member. Can see their own assigned licenses and activate them on their machines. Cannot see other members' licenses, cannot make purchases, and cannot modify team settings. Members see a simplified dashboard showing only what is relevant to them.

Removing People

When someone leaves the studio, an admin removes them from the team dashboard. Their machine activations are automatically revoked, and any licenses assigned to them return to the studio's unassigned pool. The departing member loses access immediately. If they had an individual account before joining, it reverts to individual status with no studio licenses attached.

Managing Licenses

In a studio account, licenses are owned by the studio and assigned to members. This is the fundamental difference from individual accounts, and it is what makes team management possible.

Assigning Licenses

After purchasing seats for a product, go to the Licenses section of the team dashboard. You will see your purchased products with the number of total seats and available (unassigned) seats. Select a product, click Assign, and choose the team member. They will see the product appear in their personal dashboard and can activate it on their machines.

You can assign licenses before or after the team member has joined. If you assign a license to an email address that has not accepted the invite yet, the assignment will be waiting for them when they join.

Revoking And Reassigning

When a team member leaves, changes projects, or no longer needs a specific product, revoke the assignment from the dashboard. The seat returns to your unassigned pool. You can then assign it to someone else. The revocation invalidates the previous member's activation on their next license check (or after the grace period expires, whichever comes first).

This cycle -- purchase, assign, revoke, reassign -- is how studios keep license costs aligned with actual usage. You are not paying for idle seats. When a freelancer finishes a project, reclaim the seat. When a new hire starts, assign from the pool.

Tracking Activations

The team dashboard shows exactly which member has which product activated on which machines. Each entry includes the machine name, operating system, activation date, and last validation timestamp. This gives you a complete audit trail. If a team member reports that their activation is not working, you can check the dashboard to see whether their machine is registered, whether their license has expired, or whether they have exceeded their machine limit.

Machine Limits And Activation Policies

Every license seat has a machine limit -- the number of distinct machines on which a single person can activate the software simultaneously. The default is 2-3 machines per seat, depending on the product vendor's configuration.

The Desktop-Plus-Laptop Scenario

The most common case: an artist uses a desktop workstation at the studio and a laptop at home or on location. With a 2-machine limit, both are covered under a single seat. No additional purchase required. The artist activates on the desktop, activates on the laptop, and both machines are validated independently.

If the same person also uses a dedicated render node or a third machine in a different studio room, they will hit the limit. At that point, they either deactivate one of the existing machines to free a slot, or the studio purchases an additional seat.

Handling New Machines

When a team member gets a new workstation -- hardware refresh, new laptop, or a rebuild -- they need to activate on the new machine. If they are already at their machine limit, they have two options:

1. Deactivate the old machine. The team member (or an admin) deactivates the old machine from the dashboard, freeing a slot. Then they activate on the new machine. This is the normal workflow for hardware replacements.
2. Wait for expiry. If the old machine is no longer accessible (stolen, dead drive, returned lease), the activation will expire on its own after the grace period. Once expired, the slot frees automatically. If the team member cannot wait, an admin can force-release the activation from the dashboard.

Volume Pricing

Volume pricing reduces the per-seat cost as you purchase more seats for a given product. This is designed for studios that are standardizing on a set of tools across the team.

How It Works

Pricing tiers are set by each product vendor. A typical structure looks like this:

Per-Seat vs. Per-Product Pricing

Per-seat pricing means each seat is a license for one person on a specific product. If you buy 10 seats of Product A, 10 people can use Product A. Per-product pricing is how most vendors structure their licenses.

Bundles are offered by some vendors as an alternative -- a single seat that includes access to multiple products. Check each vendor's pricing page to see whether bundles are available. Volume discounts apply to bundles in the same way they apply to individual products.

Adding Seats Mid-Cycle

You can add seats at any time. If you are on an annual billing cycle, additional seats are prorated for the remainder of the current period. The volume tier recalculates based on your new total seat count, so adding seats can sometimes push you into a lower per-seat price retroactively. Any overpayment from the tier change is credited to your next invoice.

The Cost Comparison

Consider a team of 10 people who each need a particular plugin. Purchased individually, that is 10 separate transactions at full price -- $490 total with no visibility into who has what, no ability to reassign, and 10 separate invoices to reconcile.

With a studio account at the 5-14 seat tier, the same 10 seats cost $420 total. You save $70 upfront, you get a single invoice, you can reassign seats freely, and you have a dashboard showing every activation. The savings increase with scale. At 50 seats, you are paying 41% less per seat than individual pricing, and the administrative overhead of managing licenses drops to near zero.

Deploying To Workstations

For studios with more than a handful of machines, manually installing and activating software on each workstation is not practical. This section covers deployment patterns for IT teams and technical studio managers.

Standard Installation

For most studios, the process is straightforward. Download the installer from the vendor's site, run it on each workstation, and have the team member activate with their assigned license key from the dashboard. This works well for teams under 10 machines.

Silent Activation Scripts

For larger deployments, use the Archergate CLI to activate licenses without manual interaction. The CLI accepts a license key and product identifier, contacts the activation server, and writes the local cache -- all from the command line with no GUI required.

Wrap these commands in your existing deployment scripts -- Ansible playbooks, PowerShell remoting, bash scripts over SSH, or whatever your IT team uses for configuration management. The CLI exits with standard exit codes (0 for success, non-zero for failure) so it integrates cleanly into automated workflows.

Batch Deployment Pattern

For rolling out to many machines at once, the typical pattern is:

1. Install the software package silently (vendor-specific installer flags).
2. Run archergate activate with the license key assigned to that workstation or user.
3. Verify the activation with archergate status.
4. Log the result. Move to the next machine.

Network Considerations

Activation requires a one-time outbound HTTPS connection to the license server. After activation, the local cache handles validation offline for the duration of the grace period. For air-gapped environments or studios with restrictive firewalls, ensure that the license server domain is allowlisted. The activation endpoint uses standard HTTPS on port 443 -- no special ports, no unusual protocols.

If your studio uses a proxy server, the CLI respects the HTTPS_PROXY environment variable. Set it in your deployment script before calling the activation command.

Billing And Administration

Studio accounts consolidate all licensing spend into a single billing relationship. This section covers what admins and finance teams need to know.

Consolidated Invoicing

Every purchase, renewal, and seat addition generates a line item on your studio's invoice. Monthly or annual invoices (depending on your billing cycle) are sent to the billing email on file and are available for download from the dashboard. Each invoice includes the product name, seat count, per-seat price, volume tier applied, and total amount.

Tracking Spend Per Team Or Department

If your studio has multiple departments -- audio, VFX, development, QA -- you can tag license assignments with department labels. The dashboard provides a breakdown of spend by department, making it straightforward to allocate costs to the correct budget center. Tags are freeform text, so they adapt to whatever organizational structure you use.

Export For Accounting

The dashboard supports CSV export of all billing data: invoices, line items, seat assignments, activation history, and department tags. Export a date range and hand the file to your accounting team or import it into your ERP system. The CSV includes all the fields typically required for software asset management: product name, license key, assigned user, department, activation date, renewal date, and amount paid.

Stripe Receipts

All payments are processed through Stripe. Each charge generates a Stripe receipt that is emailed to the billing address and accessible from the dashboard. Stripe receipts include the charge amount, last four digits of the payment method, date, and a unique receipt URL. For organizations that require receipts for expense reporting or tax documentation, these are available immediately after each transaction.