by
Sandeep Jain
November 15, 2022
Every SaaS product has a concept of Good/Better/Best plans. Each plan entitles the end customer to certain functionalities or features – these are called entitlements.
The essential requirement for a feature to be considered an entitlement (from our definition perspective) is that it should have some product logic associated with them. If not, the feature is simply a marketing feature.
Entitlements can be of several types:
For example, let's consider the following pricing page from Notion:
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Notion pricing doesn't contain any text entitlements, but an example could be the type of support — The Free plan could have "community" support, the Team plan could have "helpdesk" support, the Team Pro plan could have "Chat" support etc.,
In this case, it is best to model the feature as a product or add-on. We will discuss this particular nuance in a later blog in this series. Quickly, when pricing is associated with a feature, it must be part of the billing system (it is not immediately apparent that entitlements should be part of the billing system, but we will explore why that makes sense for even entitlements).
You may be wondering what the big deal with entitlements is. From the above, it should be clear that entitlements are an integral part of every SaaS product. However, they are often implemented poorly (by hard coding the logic in the code) due to poor understanding and/or inadequate tooling. Furthermore, they look deceptively simple, and if you peel the layers of this metaphorical onion, things get complex soon.
In Part 2, we'll examine the key requirements from different stakeholders for entitlements, and then in Part 3, we'll explore the pros/cons of different approaches to implementing entitlements. Stay tuned!
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