Closest to that is the NTLite Business License, which has a portable license and would cover your requirements. But it's more expensive for that reason, compensating for the potential loss of internal sharing.
It is long considered to have an online license, which would have those deactivations, it's just not requested so often as the current model is working very good, regardless what people guess the experience is like.
Let me give you my opinion for the online license, mainly to refresh it for myself as well.
- may require the same machine to deactivate for increased security.
What if you forget to do so before reinstalling the OS and lose the user data (license file).
Happened to me with Calman (color calibration software). They give you 3 deactivations, 1 activation. Then you need to contact them and request a reset. It's also very expensive software so I feel the tension each time on OS reinstall and have put in place reminders what I need to do before reinstalling.
So a perfect system for the user is deactivations and activation from any machine, as long as there is only one active.
I see those in a few of the apps I use.
However, Sandboxie few months ago warned me that I activated from hundreds of machines and invalidated my key, regardless that they allow activation/deactivation.
- OS reinstalls should not count, and many do, especially with online licenses.
- for software producers, if deactivating from any machine, which is a must in my opinion, it's the same as sharing the license with more people, just don't run it at the same time.
And since this tool has a short active usage time, that license model is not fair. Same reason why there is no full trial mode.
Of course regardless who I trust, I would gladly give the tool for free and open the Patreon account - but, that would be only a fraction of normal sales and I would not be able to do it full time. Projecting from my experience with nLite (2004->2008), free tool ran with donations and having even more users.
- user needs to be online to run the tool activated with an online license, and this tool sometimes is supposed to be used offline, especially if there is an issue with the OS and cannot get online.
For this it should require online access one a day...a week... we are then stretching the problem above and making it even easier to share the license.
On the other hand, all you need to adapt to the current model:
- run the tool mainly from one machine, as it can edit images for other machines. In other words if you already know what that VM is supposed to be configured with, and reinstall so many of them, pre-configure an image before deploying it. Also it's a cleaner method.
- another option is to have up to 5 machines and accumulate your multiple activations into the same file and use the tool from a network share (that's how I do it).
Yes, the activation file can accumulate activations for this reason, just make sure the same license.dat file is in place when adding a new machine. Then backup for both in one file, or keep the tool on a difference location which survives reinstalls.
v1.8 release date is not fixed. Added features are not date-limited by the version release, but by the Changelog listing date of that feature.
v1.8 will be switched to the stable branch when enough of new features are added to be considered a bigger update and then waited enough for newly introduced bugs to be ironed out.