Abstract: An application licensing system reduces the computational cost of providing application access to licensees by running instances of licensed applications in virtual machines and providing web-based user interfaces to client devices associated with users of a license pool. An application licensing system onboards one or more licenses for applications licensed by an organization from an application vendor. When a user of the organization wishes to access a licensed application, the application licensing system determines whether the organization's license pool permits the requested use and analyzes current uses of the requested application to determine whether a license is available for use by the user. If the set of application licenses for the organization permits the requested use, the system runs an instance of the application in a virtual machine and provides the user with access to the application through a web-based user interface.