Off-platform scanning & decryption keys
Every ticket and badge QR on frequentix is encrypted, and the key that reads them is what keeps your attendee list yours on the show floor. If you want to build or run your own scanning or lead capture — or bring in a provider to do it — that key can be licensed: agreed in writing, signed online, and released for your event.
When you need a licence — and when you don't
Scanning with frequentix's own apps — Scanner, Box Office and Leads, and the devices you pair to them — needs no licence on any plan, offline scanning included. Your data is also always yours: exports, the API and webhooks need no separate agreement either.
What does need one is the decryption key itself. Using it to operate scanning or lead capture outside frequentix without a written licence is a material breach of the terms (clause A7) — and the same clause promises the licence is something we are willing to agree, not something we refuse. This article is how that agreement happens.
Requesting a licence
Open the event in the console and find Off-platform scanning on the overview. The request asks for a few things we need to price and paper the licence:
- How many scanning licences you expect to run or sell — a range is fine.
- What you are building and how the key will be used.
- Who will operate it: your own organisation, or a named third party doing it on your behalf.
- A contact for the commercial conversation.
Requesting needs billing access on your team, and an event carries one licence conversation at a time. Submitting tells our team immediately; you can watch the status on the same page.
Terms, the agreement, and signing
We review each request and either offer terms or decline with a reason you can read on the event page (and in your email). An offer generates the agreement itself — a versioned document naming your organisation, the event, the permitted operator and the fee — for you to read in the console. Whether and when it was opened is recorded, so both sides know the terms were actually seen.
Signing is done online, and it is built to stand up as a signature: an authorised person types their full name, confirms acceptance and their authority to bind the organisation, and the time, the signing account and the network address are recorded as evidence of execution. It needs a two-step-verified session, and if we re-issue the terms while you are reading, a signature over the old version is refused until you have seen the new one.
What unlocks when you sign
- The event's decryption key. It stays hidden until someone with the share-key permission chooses to reveal it, and every reveal is recorded in your activity log — the key cannot be rotated, so the log is the account of who holds it.
- A guide to reading badges — the QR format, how to decrypt it, and the checks a scanner must make — so your developers or provider can build against exactly what our own apps read.
Fees and settling up
The agreement records one of three fee shapes: a percentage of each scanning licence you sell, a fixed amount, or no platform fee where the commercial arrangement lives somewhere else (a partnership deed, for example). For a percentage deal the final figure depends on your sales, so it settles after the event: declare the licences you sold within thirty days of the event ending, and the amount payable is worked out at the agreed rate and invoiced separately.
Revocation, and why disclosure is permanent
A licence covers one event: each event has its own key, and a duplicated event gets a fresh one, so next year's show needs its own request. If the agreement is breached we can revoke the licence, which blocks any further retrieval of the key through the console — but a key already revealed cannot be un-revealed, which is why the agreement's confidentiality and fee obligations survive revocation, and why the request-and-sign record matters as much as the key itself.