Personal Continuity Vault is a local-first desktop app. Your completed planning files stay on devices you control. That is the promise customers hear first — and it has to stay true when money changes hands.
Licensing is where a lot of privacy-minded products get sloppy. The download is careful; the activation path is a spreadsheet, a forever-valid key pasted into Discord, or a mystery server that also wants to host your documents. BePrepared needed the opposite: real commerce and seats, without turning the Vault into another cloud silo.
That is what the Azure license hub is for.
The job of the hub
The hub does not store Personal Continuity Planning contents. It answers a narrower question: is this install allowed to run under a paid license right now?
In practice that means three flows working together:
- Purchase — Stripe records a successful checkout and the hub creates a license for the buyer.
- Activate — the customer receives an activation key; the desktop app redeems it for that machine.
- Lease — the hub returns a short-lived, signed lease so the app can prove entitlement without phoning a fragile “always online” policy.
Admin work (looking up licenses, helping a customer, auditing seats) sits behind Microsoft Entra. The application code does not ship with connection strings or signing secrets. The Function App’s managed identity reaches Azure Table Storage and Key Vault the way production services should — by role, not by pasted passwords.
What we verified
Before wiring the desktop app for v1, we proved the path on real Azure infrastructure in Stripe test mode: health checks, Entra sign-in for operators, a test purchase that created a license and emailed the key, and an activation that came back with a lease signed by the Key Vault key.
That matters more than a architecture diagram. The boring parts already run.
Stack, briefly
- TypeScript on Azure Functions
- Table Storage for license and seat state
- Key Vault for signing leases
- Stripe for checkout events
- Entra for who may manage licenses
No vault documents. No “sync your will to our cloud.” Commerce and cryptography on one side; the customer’s files on the other.
Why we are proud of this piece
AltaForma builds starter sites every week. We also ship our own apps. The license hub sits in the harder middle: client product engineering with production cloud constraints, tied to a brand promise we refuse to undermine for convenience.
Desktop ↔ hub wiring lands with Vault v1. The infrastructure is already live and exercised.
For the product story around the app and site rebuild, read Personal Continuity Vault for BePrepared.biz.