Abstract: In general, the techniques are described for locally and adaptively managing license token requests for a licensed capacity feature without an explicit grant of license tokens from a centralized license server. For example, a network device for a licensed customer may locally manage a license token request for a capacity feature operating in network license mode and thus shared/contended for among multicast network devices associated with the customer. The network device may locally determine a number of locally-available tokens for the licensed capacity feature, based at least in some examples, on a number of available network-wide tokens as indicated by the license server, the number of network devices contending for the tokens, and a number of tokens already requested by the network device.