Licensing

Kontakt Player: licensing

We want to work with you to unleash your sound into the world. Whether you’re masterminding an entire orchestral library or concocting a niche instrument in your bedroom, making your creation player-compatible will open new doors.

Read on for details on how to get started, plus some background info on why you might want to. And feel free to contact us directly with any questions or feedback.

Get in touch: 3rd-party-developers@native-instruments.com

Benefits of player licensing

Extended reach – with Kontakt Player, your audience includes anyone making music with a computer, not just Kontakt owners.

Licensing and serial numbers – we take the stress out of licensing, and generating and managing serial numbers.

Copy protection – no need to set up your own copy protection: The inner workings of your device are locked, and you can access NI copy protection services.

Maintenance – anything you build will be compatible with all current operating systems, all major plug-in standards, and any host environment – now and in the future.

Dedicated support – we provide a dedicated support channel for all player licensing partners.

How to license your product

Step 1. Get in touch

Get in touch with us! We want to hear about your creations, and work out how we can support them. In an open conversation, we’ll listen to your requirements, examine some case studies, run the numbers, and see about getting your products ready for the Kontakt Player.

Step 2. Let’s make a plan

The conversation starts with a discussion about your requirements and general scope – how many serial numbers you need, for example. Our low-cost, volume-based pricing model is designed to be flexible, to help aspiring developers get started, and offer bulk discounts to more established partners.

Step 3. Send us your product

You give us your product and we encode it for use in the Kontakt Player. For each product, we ask for a one-off encoding fee of $1,000. This fee covers our development services for encoding, plus NKS Compliance Testing, and integration into the NI ecosystem.

If you release your product for Kontakt 8, there is no encoding fee involved.

Step 4. Publish your product

Once we’ve encoded your product and approved it for NKS, you can purchase serial numbers. Processing time is around 4 weeks, depending on your product and the time of the year. The price for each serial number depends on the amount of your first order and the retail value of your product (MSRP). There’s a minimum initial order of 100 serial numbers.

Step 5. Re-order serial numbers

You can order additional serial numbers whenever you want. The license price is fixed with the initial order: any additional orders will use the initial license fee throughout the lifecycle of the product. Here too, the minimum amount of serial numbers you can re-order is 100.

Step 6. Take advantage of the free product update

We ensure everyone gets to experience your product at its best by including one free update within 30 days of your product’s release. This takes care of any necessary fixes that come up during the launch period. Additionally, you get 2 free updates per year for each product.

NFR, crossgrade and free licenses

Free (Not For Resale/NFR) promotional licenses can be a great way to attract new customers and grow your brand. For your first serial order, we’ll provide an additional set of NFR serial numbers (20% of the quantity ordered) for free. Further NFR serials can be ordered at 50% of the license fee.

You can additionally order crossgrade serials to allow users to upgrade from one of your products to another. The license price calculation is based on the amount of serials ordered and the retail price of the upgrade (MSRP), see "Pricing" section below.

Or you can release a completely free product. For promotional products that don’t have a retail price, we offer a fixed price of $/€2,500 – this covers encoding and 25,000 NFR serial numbers. Any additional serial numbers and/or re-encoding will be charged at the same rate.

In case you release a free product for Kontakt 8, we don’t charge any encoding fee and also supply the first 25,000 NFR serial numbers to you for free. After that, there is a 0.20 €/$ fee per serial. Your free Kontakt 8 products need to be deployed with Native Access.

Native Access deployment

You can take advantage of the Native Access deployment system, so users can download their product directly through Native Access, immediately after registering their serial.

This way, all the user needs to do is receive a serial number from you at the point of sale, and everything else is handled using Native Access – this takes away the worry of download support, infrastructure and everything else connected with that, as we take over this process for you for a small fee of 1.5% of MSRP on the license cost.

As far as user convenience is concerned, they can use the same download-install-activate workflow for all Kontakt based products irrespective of manufacturer – which is a huge step towards easing the pains that users currently face with the myriad of tools out there that do the same thing in different ways.

	1-49 $/€	50-99 $/€	100-249 $/€	250-499 $/€	>500 $/€
100	9.0%	8.0%	7.0%	6.0%	5.0%
200-400	8.0%	7.0%	6.0%	5.0%	4.0%
500-900	7.0%	6.0%	5.0%	4.0%	3.0%
1000-1400	6.0%	5.0%	4.0%	3.0%	2.0%
>1500	5.0%	4.0%	3.0%	2.5%	1.5%

Example orders

Your product 1 - The Indie Synth:

Order details:

Order quantity: 100 serials

Retail price (MSRP): $/€49

Free NFR promotional serials: 20

Fee outline:

Individual license price: $/€4.41

Total serial licenses price: $/€441

One-off encoding fee: $/€1,000

Total: $/€1,441

Your product 2 - Cinematic Pads:

Order details:

Order quantity: 500 serials

Retail price (MSRP): $/€249

Free NFR promotional serials: 100

Fee outline:

Individual license price: $/€12.45

Total serial licenses price: $/€6,225

One-off encoding fee: $/€1,000

Total: $/€7,225

Your product 3 - The Orchestra:

Order details:

Order quantity: 1500 serials

Retail price (MSRP): $/€500

Free NFR promotional serials: 300

Fee outline:

Individual license price: $/€7.50

Total serial licenses price: $/€11,250

One-off encoding fee: $/€1,000

Total: $/€12,250