While looking-up the cost of vSphere licenses on Google, I came upon a website called “Gamivo” that appears to be a marketplace for game license keys. There you can also buy VMWare Workstation Pro 16 licenses for under 2 dollars…
Is this a scam ? Or is this legit ? I’ve been buying one-dollar Windows 10 and Office licenses for a few years now so a part of me sees nothing wrong with it… but I suspect VMWare has a different business model than Microsoft.
Anyone tried this site ? How bad was it ?
Definitely volume license keys not complying with the license agreement.
VMWare don’t have any protection on their license keys.
I’m tempted to try it. Two dollars is nothing to me. I just don’t want to feed a scammer, it’s a matter of principle.
Let me have breakfast, think on it for a sec… and if I try it I’ll let you know how it went 
This is definitely not legit, but may land you with legit keys.
Scam? Maybe, but for $2?
Pay with PayPal haha
Oh I’m looking at the prices… hahaha haha
You can find a key generator in the web, for free.
So that guy, has that, generates keys and sells them for $2…
As @NZSNIPER said, there is no online verification for their keys, at least for Workstation, therefore if it matched the algorithm, it is validated.
So I just bought that license on Gamivo. Took under a minute to create an account and use Paypal. It directly displays the license key as soon as you pay.
Used it on a fresh install on a new machine. It works. Nothing much to say
Good to know, but honestly the time it would have taken for me to find that keygen and isolate it in a VM to block any malware is worth more to me than 2 dollars
This is generally the case for all of these “cheap license keys”.
If you’re going to use these, you may as well just pirate it instead.
Its still a license violation, and at least you aren’t paying some shifty guy/company who is basically charging you to not be compliant with the licensing agreement anyway.
Cheap keys are almost always one of three things,
Note that in some countries these specific parts of license agreements are invalid making this scenario completely legal IF the seller properly documents that out of the volume licensing agreement of “1.000 users” they only sold the “37 unused ones” to that exact number of end customers for single-use only.
That’s a good point. Then again :
I’ve bought a few Office 2016 Pro licenses for a single dollar on sites like Amazon and CDiscount. At first I had the nagging feeling that although it’s in Microsoft’s best interest to let as many people use their software as possible (because they are really after our data) there had to be something “wrong” about those licenses.
Then one of the $1 Windows 10 Pro licenses I had been using on an HTPC gave me the “Windows not genuine” watermark after exactly 90 days. Because I’m ballsy, I decided to pick up the phone and call Microsoft’s customer service.
On that occasion, I had a very informative discussion was a Microsoft tech. I told him where and how I got my Windows license and asked him if it was legit. He said yes, absolutely. Those are indeed volume licenses resold online. As for mine expiring after 90 days, apparently there are some scenarios where indeed Microsoft provides some sort of 90-day free trial period. According to him, it’s a simple flag in their licenses database and mine was part of such a batch.
He told me that since I bought the license as an individual, that restriction did not apply to me. I gave him my license code. 30 seconds and one reboot later, my Windows was genuine again. And that problem hasn’t reappeared for two years since. I expect it never will.
I took the opportunity to ask if ultra-cheap Office and Visio licenses found online were also legit. They are. We are not violating any (current) Microsoft licensing term by using those licenses.
So. I don’t know about VMWare… but at least when it comes to Microsoft, there’s no reason to feel any guilt.