Possible Duplicate:
Best PHP Encoder
I am looking for a PHP encoder that can basically also manage licenses (domain etc).
My main criteria is basically price. It is not so much about which is most secure. I believe they can be all decoded, I even downloaded a few decoders to test this myself. I just want to make it a bit harder, so probably any encoder will do fine :-)
But which one would be the most affordable one? Any ideas? Most seem to be around $300 per year, pls $100 for yearly updates.
Thanks for reading this admittedly generic question!
Edit (because of recent comments) Please do not post answers like whether it makes sense to encode, or that it can be easily decoded, or that it annoys customer etc. Hope it doesn't sound too unfriendly on my part!
Every single encoder is easily cracked with a bit of knowledge. There are even (shady) web services that offer online cracking of encoded files.
Encoding products are a waste of your money outside of very certain circumstances, like limited-functionality demo copies.
Your best "protection" against piracy is a price that the market will accept and an appropriate license for your target market. Consult a lawyer.
(If your product is mis-priced, certain people in your target market would surely prefer to pirate it than pay; draconian license terms like constant online license checks and product "activation" can also effectively encourage piracy by causing users to seek out pirated versions with these checks removed.)
There are only two worthwhile players in the encoding market, Zend Guard ($600) and ionCube Encoder ($200). Both provide a similar level of protection and both require a binary module be installed on the server. In my unfortunate experience with this, it's frequently easier to convince web hosting providers to install Zend Guard due to Zend's relationship with the PHP development team. You're going to get a better user experience with Zend Guard, but ionCube is cheaper.
I'm still not going to recommend either of them. Your selection will ultimately depend on whether you can mandate that the user install the required binary extension. If you're targeting users on shared hosting, Zend Guard will win this requirements hands down. Some software providers that desire encryption frequently offer both, so the customer can decide which one works better for them.
Almost every other solution does not require a binary extension, being in pure PHP. These are trivial to crack and are a waste of time and money.
If you let people have your source, they can rip it off - encoded or not. Best you can do is make it difficult or time consuming for them.
If you want to do that for free - write yourself a little PHP script that goes through and strips all the line endings from your code (in a copy of course, or you'll annoy yourself!), that should make editing the code a nightmare without preventing it from running or slowing it down in any way. You could even go a step further and scan for variables and rename them so your code appears to make even less sense.
It won't stop someone determined to steal your code, but the only way to do that is not to give access to it away.