technologies are described herein for software product license management . following a click to run paradigm , manual user entry of product keys and manual user involvement in product activation may be avoided . a software product key can be associated with a user id . the product key and associated user id can be stored on a remote application server . the product key can be retrieved from the application server using the user id or related user credentials . an application retrieving its own product key from the application server can be supported . the user - centric approach to product key management can be useful for software license models based on subscriptions , trial software , virtual software , downloadable software , or purely web based solutions as well as traditional software license purchases . the software product can also be autonomously activated . this activation can occur as a background operation within the application client portion of the software .