Licensing for Older Designer Versions

Designer licensing for non-Disguise servers changed in April 2025 to the Designer Starter and Designer Pro scheme.

Older versions of Designer require the legacy licensing scheme.

For those who currently have one or multiple legacy software licenses, you will be issued with new legacy licenses matching the ones you held before, and with the same expiry date as your current Designer Pro license. All you need to do is activate these new legacy licenses, following the exact same steps as your Pro license activation.

Important

From Designer r30.5, Designer automatically checks for license changes in the background, so if you’re on a monthly license you don’t need to manually update your license each month when the expiry gets extended for another month after the monthly subscription payment is taken.

However, earlier versions of Designer (r30.4 and below) do not support automatic license updates. If you’re using one of these versions, you’ll need to manually update your license each month (or annually, if you’re on an annual plan) to apply the new expiry date.

Designer versions and their license requirements

The table below shows which Designer versions require which license, and how to obtain this license.

Version	Licensing Requirement	Requires Dongle	How to Obtain a License
r17.6.2 and earlier [1]	pre-r18 Legacy license (predating any modern licenses)	Yes [2]	Contact Disguise Support.
r18.0 to r30.8	Supports the legacy [3] Designer license	No	Issued automatically when subscribing to Designer Pro [4]
r29.3 & r30.5 to r30.x	Supports both the legacy Designer license and Designer Pro license	No	Subscribe via Disguise Cloud
r31 and later	Supports Designer Pro license only	No	Subscribe via Disguise Cloud

^[1] For pre-r18 licensing requests and any queries, please reach out to Disguise Support. There is no charge for issuing these legacy licenses, and this process will not change.

^[2] Support for software-based licenses (CmAct containers) was first introduced in r18.0. Earlier versions require a physical USB CodeMeter dongle to activate licenses to. Dongles can be purchased in our online shop. Note that old CodeMeter dongles cannot hold any modern Disguise licenses (see table below).

^[3] The legacy licensing scheme displayed two product codes in CodeMeter: one with a Product Code of 400, this previously had no expiry date, however the 400 license on its own does not enable Designer to run, it was used as an identifier for Designer to differentiate it from other license types; another with a Product code of 100, this is the license which enables Designer to run, and usually has a time limit, displayed in the Valid Until field in CodeMeter. Older Disguise servers also use Product Code 100, but without a time-limit. Going forwards, any legacy licenses issued will also set an expiry date for the Product Code 400 license to avoid confusion. Note that Designer Pro only uses one ProductCode license entry in CodeMeter.

^[4] An additional legacy license for r18.0 to r30.8 is issued automatically when subscribing to Designer Pro, matching the duration of Designer Pro. Legacy licenses are retrieved from the Subscriptions tab of Disguise Cloud, using the same activation procedure as the Designer Pro license.

For more information on subscribing to Designer Pro through Disguise Cloud, visit Designer Subscriptions

CodeMeter Container Support

Licenses issued by Disguise can be activated on different types of CodeMeter containers. Physical containers, called CmDongle exist in various form-factors, see the manufacturer’s website. The most common physical container is a USB dongle.
Dongle-less licensing is enabled via software-based CmAct containers that are bound to a particular machine.

Physical Container Hardware Revisions

Physical containers come in different hardware revisions, which are indicated by the first digit in their serial number. Each new hardware revision adds new features, so older dongles will not have the same capabilities as newer ones.

When Designer was first released in March 2012, all Designer licenses required a physical CodeMeter dongle. A newer dongle hardware revision was issued since 2016, enabling support for the CodeMeter feature “Universal FirmCode” (UFC), that simplifies license handling for both CmDongle and CmAct containers. In 2020, with the release of r18.0, Disguise introduced dongleless CmAct licenses, based on the UFC feature. Since June 2023 all Designer licenses (except the pre-r18 Legacy license) are exclusively based on UFC, and so require a newer CodeMeter dongle (or activation on a CmAct container).
Dongles can be purchased in our online shop

Container Type	Hardware Revision	Serial Number	Issued since	Issued until	Can hold pre-r18 legacy license	Can hold modern licenses
CmDongle	2	2-xxxxxxx	2012	2015	Yes	No
CmDongle	3	3-xxxxxxx	2016	-	Yes	Yes
CmAct	-	130-xxxxxxxxxx	2020	-	Yes	Yes

Further information

• License Activation
• Offline License Activation
• Transfer a Designer Pro License