We got sick of giving 30% of our revenue to marketplaces, so we built own licensing logic

Hey guys, Quick story. A while back, I launched a desktop tool and realized I was losing about $3,000 out of every $10,000 just to "convenience fees" from marketplaces. It wasn't even about the payment processing—it was mostly for the license key generation and basic gatekeeping. The worst part? I didn't even "own" my customers. No emails, no direct feedback, nothing. I decided to stop being a tenant on those platforms and built my own backend to handle the heavy lifting. The logic we went with