Methodology & privacy

How CreatorVault works

CreatorVault gives digital-product creators two things: a way to mint secure software license keys, and a clear picture of what each selling platform actually costs them. Both run entirely in your browser. This page explains the cryptography behind the keys, the math behind the fee comparison, and exactly what does (and doesn't) leave your machine.

• Privacy guarantee
• How keys are generated
• Key entropy
• Character sets
• Using the keys
• The fee calculator
• Not advice
• Roadmap

The privacy guarantee: nothing leaves your browser

CreatorVault has no backend. When you configure a key format, generate keys, or type prices and sales numbers into the fee calculator, every byte stays on your machine. The work happens in JavaScript, locally, in the tab you're looking at.

• No network requests with your data. Nothing you type or generate is uploaded, POSTed, beaconed, or sent to any server — ours or anyone else's.
• No logging or storage. Keys and numbers aren't written to a database, a log, local storage, or analytics. Close or reload the tab and they're gone.
• It works offline. Load the page once, disconnect from the internet, and both tools still run. That's the simplest proof there's nothing to upload to.

How license keys are generated

Every character in every key comes from the Web Crypto API — specifically crypto.getRandomValues(), the browser's cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generator (CSPRNG). We deliberately do not use Math.random(), which is fast but predictable and unsuitable for anything a customer might try to guess or forge.

Picking a character means choosing an index into the chosen alphabet. A naïve randomByte % charsetLength would introduce modulo bias — some characters would appear slightly more often than others when the alphabet size doesn't evenly divide 256. CreatorVault avoids that with rejection sampling: it draws random bytes and discards any that fall in the biased tail, so every symbol in the set is exactly equally likely.

How key entropy is calculated

After each batch, CreatorVault reports the approximate entropy of a single key in bits — a measure of how hard it is to guess. For a key built from n randomly chosen characters out of an alphabet of size s, the entropy is:

bits = n × log₂(s)

So a 20-character key (4 segments × 5 chars) over Crockford base32 (32 symbols) carries 20 chars × 5 bits/char = 100 bits of entropy — far beyond brute-force range. The prefix and separators are fixed structure, so they don't add entropy; only the random characters count. Use the live readout to size keys for your needs: more segments or longer segments raise entropy quickly.

Character sets

Different products want different key alphabets. CreatorVault offers several, each with a clear trade-off between density and human-friendliness:

Bits per character is log₂ of the symbol count. Multiply by the number of random characters in a key to get total entropy.

Using the keys in your product

The keys CreatorVault produces are high-quality random identifiers. They are not self-validating or digitally signed on their own. The common ways to use them:

1. Issue-and-store. Generate keys, store them in your database as you sell them, and check an incoming key against that list at activation. Simple and robust for most online products.
2. Single-use issuance. Hand each key to exactly one customer, mark it used on first activation, and revoke it if it leaks. Because the keys are high-entropy, they can't be guessed in bulk.
3. Signed licenses (advanced). For offline validation, pair the key with a server-side signature or a license file your app can verify without phoning home. This is part of the licensing API on our roadmap.

How the fee comparison works

The calculator models the most common creator-platform fee shape: a percentage of the sale price plus a flat per-transaction fee. For a product priced at P sold U times a month, each platform's take-home is:

keep / sale = P − (P × pct% + flat)

From that it derives what you keep per sale, per month (× U), and per year (× 12), and highlights the best available option as well as the spread between the best and worst real platforms. The defaults reflect each platform's publicly listed pricing at build time, but they are estimates you can edit in the "Edit the fee assumptions" panel to match your plan or a platform's current rate.

The comparison deliberately keeps the model transparent rather than precise: it does not try to model payment-processing fees, currency conversion, VAT/sales tax, plan tiers, refunds, or chargebacks, all of which vary by seller and region. The "CreatorVault (planned)" row is an illustrative target for an unreleased low-fee checkout, clearly marked so the table stays honest.

This is a tool, not professional advice

On the roadmap

Open the tools