How time-based licenses work
You can purchase a new time-based license and apply it to your account. There are two types of licenses that you can purchase. One is the co-term license which will have the same expiration date as your existing license, the other is the non-co-termed license which is independent of any of your existing license. Co-term licenses must be applied to the same serial number of your existing FTC license. Non-co-termed licenses have their own user quota, registration date, and expiration date, and will have no impact on your existing license.
Flexible time-based usage model
FTC calculates your quota credit balance and reminds of your account balance accordingly using the following formula:
Quota credit balance = Total quota assigned to account – the number of end-users in account
FTC uses a flexible time-based licensing model, allowing you to add and delete users within the life span of your license as long as you have the quota to do so. For example, for a license with a 25-user quota for one year, you can have the same 25 users on your account from the beginning to the end of the life of your license, or delete some of those users to release the quota for some new users.
Assuming that you registered and activated an FC2-10-TKCLD-445-01-12 license on July 1st, 2021. According to the form above, you will have 100 user quotas, meaning that you can have 100 end-users on your account until July 1, 2022. Each time you add an end-user and assign it to an auth client, such as FortiGate, FortiAuthenticator, or FortiSandBox, etc., your quota balance will be deducted by 1 quota, and the Users/Max Users tab on the Dashboard will show 1/100.
If you only have one user in your account for the month July 2021, the diagram on the Usage page will show that you have 1.0 on 2021-07.
As long as your account is active, your quotas are reusable. For example, if you have allocated 100 quotas for 100 users, but those users are still not available only one month before your license expires. In this case, FTC allows you to delete those 100 original users to release the quota and then create 100 new users with the released quota.
Quota and SMS
FTC can use SMS messages to send token activation/transfer codes to your end-users' mobile devices . The quota of SMS messages you are entitled varies with license SKU, and is calculated using the following formula:
SMS quota = (Total quota assigned to account) x 125
Assuming that you have 100 user quotas in your account, your SMS quota will be 12,500 (=100 x 125). Each time you send an SMS message, FTC will deduct some SMS credits from your account. The number of SMS credits that FTC charges varies, depending on the country or region where the end-user's phone number is registered. For more information, see the SMS Rate Card.
You may not be able to use SMS service when your remaining SMS credits are running low or negative.