This is a very interesting question in these headless, multi device times.

I have passed it along to Martin Ottosen who is Product Management Director for the CMS

Hi Markus,

Im not an Episerver official, but what i understand license wise, Episerver cares about how many sites you are managing content for, not how many content management sites you have (and how many epi servers are running)

if the editing site is managing the content delivered as site1.com and site2.com rendered on a single server through the content delivery API using e.g. pure js implementation or a node.js, you just need licenses for a 2 sites and 1 server.

Contact Your Episerver Partner of choice.

Hi,

As I know you do not need more extra Episerver license for the extenal non-Episerver site. You only to make sure that your web api in EpiServer is required authentication or not and how to pass authentication. If you use same OWIN authentication as builtin EPiServer's service api then your friend need to make a request to get token first and add that token to the next request's header to pass authentication in your Episerver site.

I do belive it is like Gosso write, but I also like to wait for an official response from Martin to mark it as a correct answer

We'll see what Martin says.

But let's say I have the following scenario:

I have a big newspaper website running on EPiServer CMS. Does everyone have to pay license when consuming its news via RSS?

Hello,

I saw that the question mentioned about 2 sites: 1 EpiServer site and 1 simple ASP.NET MVC site not using EPiServer at all. So I think it is not meaning to add more extra license for non EpiServer site

That is true Binh but since the other site is a direct consumer of the Episerver site I think it will need to have a licence, but I will wait for Martins response.

Girre:
Propably not since RSS is not the same thing as a api, it has a lot of limitations that will make it okey to use I think

Okey i understand that, but then a read-only webapi would be okey to use without license aswell?

Girre: No propably not since there is a huge difference between a RSS flow and a read-only webapi.

It is a big gray zone here

I guess it depends how you achitect the sites. If you are a direct consumer of the main site you'll need a license, if you export the data some how (RSS or other) it is an other story IMO...

:)

I'm following this but it seems the thread has died. 

In the near future it might become an issue since we are looking into an architecture where we use Episerver basically as an API for a frontend built in .net core 3 with Razor Components. If this would require twice the license cost it would definitely be a show stopper for that kind of architecture. Ideally we wouldn't use Epi that way but since it doesn't run on .net core at all this would be the only way to use Razor Components.

Can we get an official answer for this kind of setup please?

Hej Tommy,

Your license comes with a server and a site. Or if you bought another "package" license, for example one server and 7 sites, which means you may have 7 front ends. So in my understand, it is quite easy to understand, it depends on your agreement. Check with your partner representative at Episerver for what you have and prices.

Br.

So Gosso, would this mean that the episerver site in my example is not counted as a site only the separate frontend site is?

Are you saying that my example would still count as 1 server and 1 site? This example would be a cloud license in a private Azure.

Tommy, yes! As far as i understand.

Hi guys,

Gosso is correct, with the sites / servers license model a "site" represent a domain that delivers content (ignoring translation). That model is simple as long as edit and delivery are closely coupled, but increasingly a gray area with a wider range of delivery strategies being employed. 

One reason why DXC-S pricing is focused on page views, is to avoid the site dimension.

https://www.episerver.com/legal/license-types/ has some language around sites in Section 1 and 3

Martin, the way they talk about sites in the licence-types page seems to indicate that epi consider a site as a .Net web that runs the episerver application and doesn't mention at all what happens when that site itself acts like an API.

----

"Sites(s)" means a web site run on Software and valid for one (1) Episerver application. Each unique application consists of a web site or a virtual directory within Microsoft's™ Internet Information Services ("IIS"). Each Site in IIS may only include one Episerver application; this limitation is purely for technical reasons. When a customer uses several domains, different scenarios affect the number of Sites within Episerver that need to be created in IIS. This, in turn, will affect the number of License(s) that must be purchased. For additional information, please see Section 3.1 and 3.2 below. Please contact Episerver if You have any questions.

----

In my case the "frontend" might as well be run on a linux machine since it doesnt really run episerver at all or even use any of the episerver dlls (which it can't since its a .net core application). In my example the episerer site only exposes it's content as json instead of rendered html. It is similar to the vue based SPA epi uses as an examle (the music festival thing) but with the vue site as static files on a separate webbserver. Technically i might want to run the frontend on multiple docker instances and that would still count as a single site in the statement above right?

Technically (i like that word...) if a site has various APIs that exposes different parts of the content to different consumers (like another site fetching news or a mobile app that fetches some shortcuts) it would probably fit the model, but what if in my case i had 1 epi with a domainname like api.test.com and then 10 different frontends (not even running .net) with various domainnames that would fetch different content and present them like they are their own sites? 

Just trying to be the devils advocate here, not because I want to cheap out on licenses but because the SPA/vue/.net core architectures can complicate things and it should be clear where the line is drawn so there is no risk that a huge project ends up with multiple license costs....

So Tommy, talked to Episerver about this. And frankly, they havent sorted out these scenarios. The license model of today is not adapted to Headless.

Yes Episerver probably wants you to license for 10 sites, but for now, your 1 site 1 server license is enough because you only have one API frontend. It will probably take weeks/month before they figured this out.