License for a custom API page

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Posted on by MichelangeloR

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I've published another post and from the answer I've received I've understood that you need an Essentials or Premium license to create a custom API page. At the moment our license is Free, my question is: is it possible to buy an Essentials license for just the time necessary to create a custom API page (let's say one month), publish it and then downgrade to the Team Member license? This because in this stage we are still prototyping and don't need yet a full license. If so, the second question is: will the published custom API page work even if the license is Team Member? Thanks

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Greg Kujawa 787 on at

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I can't speak to the downgrade option to go from an Essentials license to a Team Member license. Although I would doubt it would be possible, based on previous experiences. Worst-case would be purchasing an Essentials license for a month. Then move to a Team Member license after that. For my personal BC dev work I work off a local Docker environment for BC. So I can develop and deploy what I need to without worrying about licensing.

As for licensing required for a deployed BC element, once it's deployed, then licensing and user permissions come into play for whomever is accessing the BC element. If it's just passing back a BC page through an API call response, then the user would need to have at least a Team Member license, and require read access to the page. If this user is really an inferred user based on an Azure app registration that connects to BC, then that inferred user would need that licensing and access permissions.

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OussamaSabbouh 11,005 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Hello ,

yes, you can temporarily assign an Essentials or Premium license to create and publish a custom API page, then downgrade later — the API object will stay published. But no, it won’t be usable with only Team Member licenses: custom APIs require Essentials or Premium at runtime, not just at development time. So this works for prototyping/building, but Team Member users cannot call the API once you downgrade.

Regards,

Oussama Sabbouh

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YUN ZHU 98,014 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Hi, you can add licenses, but you cannot downgrade.
Therefore, you should purchase at least one Essential license before purchasing any other Team Member licenses.

Hope this can give you some hints.

Thanks.

ZHU

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Dhiren Nagar 2,685 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Hi,

You can buy the essential license for one month, publish all the customization as per your requirement and then downgrade the license. Basically downgrading is buying another subscription only. You can not downgrade a license if you subscribe it for year and then want to downgrade after a month. You basically need to buy another team member licenese.

So subscribe Essential for a month or whatever time period you need it. Once it ends, subscribe another team member or any other license you need for whatever period you need and assign it to user.

Regards,

Dhiren.

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Greg Kujawa 787 on at

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custom APIs require Essentials or Premium at runtime, not just at development time

I don't believe this is the case. If we are talking about a BC web service endpoint (which is essentially an API endpoint from an outside perspective), then as long as the BC resource is a "read-only" element such as a page, the Team Member license is indeed sufficient for accessing it. As either a BC user or an Azure app registration associated with a BC user.

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MichelangeloR 103 on at

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@Greg Kujawa this is indeed the workaround I found and it worked. You don't need to create a custom API page through AL (with a non-Free license), but you can simply use the Web Services to publish an existing page through OData V4. It comes with limitations and it can be modified or even deprecated in the future, but for simple read-only requests you can do this even with a free license. For a prototyping stage this is enough.

Thanks for the answer

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