Licensing intermediary
Supertab
In short
Supertab pairs Supertab Pass, a pay-as-you-go tab for human readers, with Connect, which classifies and licenses non-human traffic on Fastly, CloudFront, Cloudflare Workers or WordPress, from USD 99 a month. A crawler that never asks for a token is only logged or blocked, and Supertab does not publish its revenue share.
- Type
- Licensing intermediary
- Homepage
- supertab.co
- In one line
- Managed RSL licensing service: Supertab Connect hosts a publisher's license.xml and RSL license server, issues license tokens to crawlers, checks them at the CDN with its SDK and bills the use, priced from USD 99 a month.
- Last read
- 2026-11-05
What Supertab does for this layer
From the vendor's own pages
Supertab Connect's Starter plan costs USD 99 a month for publishers with up to 2.5 million monthly visitors, 5 million bot classifications a month, one active licensee and a 30-day free trial. (supertab.co) Supertab's Enterprise plan adds payments infrastructure, disbursement and merchant-of-record services, and Supertab says it meters, prices and settles licensed access and pays publishers monthly. (supertab.co) Supertab Connect's SDK enforces the Crawler Authentication Protocol at the CDN or in the application: it detects bot traffic, validates the license token signature and claims, allows or blocks, and logs the event for billing, while human traffic passes untouched. (connect-docs.supertab.co) In Supertab Connect a crawler finds the publisher's terms through a License: directive in robots.txt, reads the RSL license.xml with the usage values search, ai-input, ai-index and ai-train, and requests a token if licensed access is offered. (connect-docs.supertab.co)
Supertab Connect documents deployments on Fastly Compute or VCL, AWS CloudFront, Cloudflare Workers and WordPress, with SDKs in TypeScript, PHP and Python for other CDNs. (connect-docs.supertab.co) Supertab describes itself as infrastructure for consumption-based commerce, pairing Supertab Pass for human readers with Supertab Connect for classifying and licensing non-human traffic. (supertab.co) Every Supertab Connect plan includes opt-in participation in licensing demand sources, which Supertab lists as marketplaces, collectives and Supertab-sourced demand. (supertab.co)
Claims the vendor makes about itself
Supertab says it runs the full OAuth 2.0 token endpoint for RSL, with client credential flows, license payload validation, token issuance, revocation and error handling, and calls the server "Fully compliant with RSL 1.0". (supertab.co) Supertab's homepage claims that more than 50% of web crawl traffic now comes from AI bots and automated agents and that going live with AI licensing takes hours. (supertab.co)
Products and plans
| Product | What it does | Price model | From | As of |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Supertab Connect | Hosted RSL license, license server (OLP), edge token checks (CAP), bot classification and billing for AI access. | monthly subscription by visitors and licensees | USD 99 | 2026-11-05 |
| Supertab Pass | Pay-as-you-go tab for human readers. | |||
Standards
| Standard | Status | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| RFC 9309 (robots.txt) | Supports | Crawlers discover the publisher's RSL license through a License: directive in robots.txt. (connect-docs.supertab.co) |
| Web Bot Auth | No statement | Crawler identity runs through RSL license tokens checked by CAP; the docs index does not mention Web Bot Auth (checked 2026-11-05). |
| Content Signals | No statement | No Content-Signals mention on the homepage, pricing page or docs index (checked 2026-11-05). |
Our checks
| Check | Result | Method | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Homepage fetch | HTTP 200 | GET with the crawl user agent after a robots.txt check | 2026-11-05 |
What Supertab does not do
- Supertab Connect cannot make an unlicensed crawler pay; unlicensed requests are logged or blocked at the edge, and the crawler has to choose to request a token.
- Supertab does not publish the share it keeps from licensing revenue settled through Connect (pricing page read 2026-11-05).
Reading notes
Supertab is the former Laterpay business, judging by a careers link that points to laterpay.jobs.personio.de, but no Supertab page says so in words, so it is not stated as a fact.
Related pages on this site
Sources
Last reviewed 2026-11-05