Renew, Upgrade, or Downgrade a CSE License

Apply an activation key to an existing product, and how the resulting expiration date is calculated

  • Last validated: Oct 2, 2026
  • 12 minutes to read

Overview

Changing an annual CSE license means purchasing an activation key and applying it to the existing product. Every application presents the same two choices, Renew or Upgrade, and the expiration date that results depends on the relative value of what you already hold and what you are applying.

Annual and term licenses are commitments. A service is held at a given tier for a defined period, and changing it requires a new activation key. Monthly subscriptions behave differently and can be changed at any time. See Provision and Manage a Monthly Subscription.

Prerequisites

  • A CSE activation key for the service, tier, term, and user quantity you intend to apply. See CSE Licensing and Activation Keys.
  • The serial number of the registered CSE product.

Where to apply a key

Two controls apply a key to a product:

  • The activation field at the top of the product page, which determines from the key which service to activate. This is the more reliable of the two, because it does not depend on selecting the right row.
  • The Activate button on a specific service row, which applies the key to that service.

Either works. Use the field at the top unless you have a reason to target a specific row.

Renew compared with Upgrade

After entering a key, a confirmation dialog presents both options and states the resulting user count and expiration date for each. Nothing is applied until you confirm.

  • Renew keeps the user count and extends the term. Five users with a year remaining, renewed with a five-user one-year key, remain five users and the expiration moves out by a year.
  • Upgrade adds the purchased users to the existing count. Five users plus a five-user key becomes ten users.

Because Upgrade changes the user count, the remaining value of the existing license has to be recalculated against the larger count. That recalculation is proration.

How proration works

Proration converts the value you already hold into the equivalent amount of what you are moving to. It applies automatically whenever a key is applied, and it can move an expiration date either earlier or later.

Changing the user count

Consider five users with one year remaining, and a key for ten users for one year.

  • Choosing Upgrade to fifteen users, where both terms are a year, produces no change to the date.
  • Choosing Renew at ten users produces eighteen months. The ten-user key is worth one year at ten users. The five users with a year remaining are worth six months at ten users, because doubling the user count halves the duration that value covers. One year plus six months is eighteen months.

Changing the tier

Moving between Basic and Advanced introduces a second factor. Advanced costs more per user for the same term than Basic, so a day of Basic does not convert into a full day of Advanced.

The consequences are:

  • Upgrading from Basic to Advanced pulls the expiration date in. The Basic value you hold buys less time at the higher Advanced rate, so the date moves earlier. Five users of Basic with a year remaining convert to appreciably less than a year of Advanced at the same user count.
  • Downgrading from Advanced to Basic pushes the expiration date out. The Advanced value you hold buys more time at the lower Basic rate, so the date moves later.

Note: The exact date is calculated from current pricing at the time the key is applied. The confirmation dialog always states the resulting expiration date before you commit, so use that figure rather than estimating.

Activating an additional service

Applying a key for a service the product does not yet hold activates that service rather than renewing or upgrading anything. The confirmation dialog shows the same information: the update type, the resulting user count, and the resulting expiration date.

This is the step required when a customer purchased both SPA and SIA but registered with only one key. See Activate Cloud Secure Edge in MySonicWall.

Removing a service

On a monthly subscription, a service can be set to expire on a chosen date, or removed by setting the security access option to None. On an annual license, the service runs to the end of its term.

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