What does one production environment per app mean?

One common question we receive is if you have to purchase separate licenses for your staging environments? The answer is "No" and I'll elaborate below.

TL;DR;

You can have many staging environments. As long as they are not real production apps.
Your application can have multiple instances as long as the entry-point is one URL.

We're developers too and we understand that you might want to deploy your app in other environments before pushing to production.

Those staging environments might have the Rails.env set to production, and that's fine. You should add those URLs on the license page and everything will be ok.

This does not cover multi-URL tenancy scenarios where you have a subdomain or a custom URL for each user account. That requires a different type of license and if you'll write to us here we'd love to share more details.

Check out the related One license per domain FAQ page.

What about multiple instances of the same app?

If that application is hosted on a kubernetes swarm or some similar setup (so there are multiple running instances) but serves off of one URL to one category of customers, that counts as one production environment.