Pithias
Subscription tiers with features gated per plan, entitlement by seats and usage, and a back office the vendor's team runs themselves.
Pithias had built a vertical SaaS product. The licensing layer underneath was still what you build in a hurry to ship the first version. Subscription tiers were implicit in code, not configurable. Seat counts were enforced in some places and not others. Usage was not metered at all.
The commercial team could not change a plan without an engineer deploying code. Customer success could not extend a trial without filing a ticket. The product had outgrown its licensing layer, and rebuilding it while customers were live on the system was the engineering challenge.
A delivery pod took the licensing and entitlement workstream end to end, built to run inside Pithias's existing SaaS without disrupting live tenants.
The entitlement model holds subscription tier, seat allocation and usage quotas as data, not code. Changing a plan or extending a trial is a configuration change the commercial team makes. Not a deploy.
Features are gated per plan at a single entitlement check that an engineer calls, rather than scattered conditional logic across the product. Adding a new tier is a data change, not a refactor.
Seats and usage both metered against the subscription. Usage is sampled at the API edge and aggregated hourly, cheap enough to leave on all the time and fast enough that an admin sees current consumption in near real time.
Enforcement is tiered too. Soft limits trigger a warning on the admin console; hard limits block the operation and surface a clear reason. Nothing fails silently.
A back office the vendor's commercial and customer success teams operate directly: list tenants, see their current plan and usage, extend a trial, override a limit, apply an ad hoc credit, read the audit log. Every change is recorded, so "who authorised this" can always be answered.
Grace handling for renewal lapses: the tenant stays functional for a defined window with the admin notified, rather than cutting access at midnight on the renewal date and generating a Monday morning incident.
Two to three engineers over three to six months, delivered as a scoped pod inside Pithias's engineering process.
A licensing layer the commercial team can configure without an engineer, usage visible to the vendor's own team in near real time, and enforcement that signals rather than surprises.
Capabilities used
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