Agencies & Enterprise
Enterprise licensing that ends in ownership.
For agencies running Total CMS across a client’s sites. You build and run them; your client is the institution. Here’s the model for you, and the diligence material for their reviewers.
- Licensed
- Per site, on a volume curve quoted per project
- Billed
- Monthly or annually, per site from go‑live
- Fits
- Roughly five sites and up
- Term
- 24 months, then a perpetual right to run it
- Hosting
- Managed by us, EU regions available, or your own servers
- Licensing
- Online, or offline for air-gapped networks
How it works
One license per site, two ways to run it.
Each site is licensed on a volume curve quoted per project, not at list price. Billing for a site starts at go-live, when it’s publicly accessible with the production domain pointed, not on a planned schedule. How development and staging are licensed during the build is part of each quote. There’s a monthly minimum, which is why it fits deployments of about five sites and up.
Managed
License, hosting and updates on one line item. Sites run on a dedicated VPS through BetterSiteHost, also operated by Aspect Services, with EU regions available. We apply the updates, so you don’t run upgrade cycles across the fleet.
Self-hosted or air-gapped
Total CMS needs PHP 8.2+ and nothing else, so it runs on your servers or your client’s. For networks with no outbound connection, an offline license file validates locally and nothing calls home. Updates are transferred and installed through your own change control.
Ownership
What happens at month 24.
Every subscription license mirrors our one-time licenses: a 24-month minimum term, after which the license confers a perpetual right to run the software. Stay subscribed and that perpetual version advances with you. Cancel after the term and the sites keep running on the version you have, on any hosting you choose.
Most CMS subscriptions don’t work this way. The subscription buys hosting, updates and support. It never holds your client’s site hostage.
Standard license terms are in the EULA. Enterprise subscriptions are governed by separate written agreements that carry the same 24-month-to-perpetual structure.
What’s covered
In the subscription, and what isn’t.
Included
- A Total CMS Pro license per site: full MCP access, OAuth 2.1, custom schemas
- Managed hosting with updates applied, or offline licensing for isolated networks
- Priority support, on the terms in your agreement
- Advance notice of security releases, ahead of publication
- Custom terms and invoicing, contracted with Aspect Services, LLC
Not out of the box
- Single sign-on (SAML 2.0, LDAP, Active Directory). It can be built as a custom extension, quoted separately.
- A manual penetration test by an accredited firm. Testing is automated and OWASP Top 10-aligned; a manual test can be arranged at your client’s cost.
For your client’s reviewers
Send them these.
When IT, security or procurement needs to sign off, these are written for exactly that reading. The Total CMS source is public and present in every deployment, so a security team can audit the claims instead of taking them on trust.
Trust & Compliance
Security model, data handling, business continuity, air-gapped deployments, and how licensing behaves under review.
Hosting & Infrastructure (opens BetterSiteHost in a new tab)
Uptime, backups, disaster recovery, sub-processors, and data residency for managed hosting.
Legal
The license agreement, with the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy linked from it.
Who you’re contracting with
Aspect Services, LLC, since 2008.
Aspect Services, LLC was incorporated in California in 2008 and has operated continuously since. It owns and runs Total CMS, BetterSiteHost and Weaver’s Space, with 4,500+ Total CMS licenses deployed. Joe Workman, who builds the product, will build your quote.
The continuity answer is in the architecture. Content is flat files in an open format on infrastructure you control, the source ships with every deployment, licenses are perpetual after their term, and nothing we operate needs to stay reachable for a site to serve pages. If Aspect Services disappeared tomorrow, every deployed site would keep running.
Start a conversation.
Tell us roughly how many sites and on what timeline, the hosting regions you need, and anything unusual: isolated networks, single sign-on, compliance frameworks in play. Joe usually replies within a day or two.