Unless 'continue to work with the same license tier as before' means the license tier before the one you have now or something. So even though this behavior is to be expected (it seems like a logical result to me), it's not what is indicated in the manual. This of course limited the throughput quite a bit, and luckily it was easily fixed after fixing the DNS issue and doing a manual license renewal. So when people started complaining about packet loss and other random issues it took me a while to discover the licenses was now listed as 'free' instead of p1. Unfortunately someone changed something on the DNS server which caused the CHR to be unable to verify the license status. So in my case I have a CHR with a p1 license running on AWS for more than a year now. However, router will continue to work with the same license tier as before. CHR Licenses are installed via your account login - if you don't already have a MikroTik client account, you can create one for free here: After ordering, reply to confirmation email with your mikrotik account login username or write the username detail as comment during checkout process. If deadline-at date is reached without successfully contacting the account server, the router will consider that license has expired and will disallow further software updates.

Communication attempts will be performed once an hour after the date on next-renewal-at and will not cease until the server responds with an error. In '/system license' menu router will indicate the time next-renewal-at when it will attempt to contact server located on.

Mikrotik chr free license