At work we have GitLab, so I pay for the Gitlab Merge Requests plugin as much as a buck and a half per month to do code reviews like a human from the IDE, not from the browser.
With paid plugins for IntelliJ, if anyone hasn't encountered them, everything is like with all stores: you register with JetBrains, download the plugin in IDE, tell it your account, buy a subscription. And this just worked like this for some time.
Then I install a clean new Android Studio, hedgehog instead of giraffe, and start suffering. The plugin is there, it's installed, I see it, it opens, but can't validate the subscription. Well, that is, classic, money is paid, but nothing works. And so I lived for two weeks. Brief attempts to figure it out led nowhere, and there wasn't enough time to delve deeper.
The plugin itself says that in Help - Find Actions you need to look for the Manage Licenses item, but it's not there. On the internet they write that in the same Help there should be a Register Plugins or just Register item - they're not there. Moreover Hedgehog doesn't even seem to be to blame here, I checked on freshly reinstalled Giraffe - there are no such items there either. Checked on Community Idea 2023.1.1, on which Studio is built on top - they're there. What the differences are is completely unclear.
So, it turned out that for licenses to work in paid plugins you need to install another plugin - JetBrains Marketplace Licensing Support. In IDEA it seems to be there by default, but not in Studio. After installation the license hooked up and everything worked without any additional actions at all. I'd bet my tooth I never installed it manually in my life. If only there was also a plugin to download plugins and a plugin for downloaded plugins to work.
The biggest joke of this story is that any Paid plugin during installation says that you need to also install the plugin for licenses, otherwise it refuses to continue installation. How I did this two weeks ago - I have no idea. Most likely I miscalculated somewhere myself, but I don't understand where.