Building blocks
Monetizing your software is five steps in a line: you model products and features, package them into plans, and grant them to customers as entitlements; a customer activates one and you meter what they use. Everything else on this page adjusts that line rather than adding a step to it.
What adjusts the line
Section titled “What adjusts the line”The solid boxes are the line every customer travels. The dashed ones adjust it, and each stays out of your way until you need it:
- Suites decide which products. A suite is what you sell; a product is what you build. Most of the time those are the same thing, and Oclavex keeps a suite for your product quietly so the word never appears — until you sell two products as one subscription, and the suite is what prices them together.
- Offers decide what the grant contains. An offer is a template you author once and turn into entitlements repeatedly, instead of filling in every field per customer.
- Add-ons are granted on top of an entitlement that already has a plan. An add-on is not a starting point and not a stage in the line.
A suite and an offer split one decision: the suite says which products, the offer says what the grant contains.
The pieces
Section titled “The pieces”| Building block | What it is |
|---|---|
| Products & versions | The thing you license — identified by a code and a version. |
| Features & the feature catalog | The capabilities a product offers, defined once and reused. |
| Plans & plan sets | Named packages that set values and limits for the features you sell. |
| Entitlements & offers | The grant: what a customer may use, and how. |
| Activation & sessions | Turning an entitlement into a running license on a device. |
| Metering, quotas & credits | How consumption is counted, capped and priced. |
| Suites | The commercial unit — one or more products sold and priced together. |
| Add-ons | Feature choices for one suite, granted on top of a customer’s plan. |
| Campaigns & attribution | The why behind a commercial action, and the touches that attribute revenue to it. |
Your customers meet only the product and the license
Section titled “Your customers meet only the product and the license”Everything above is yours to model. The person using your software meets only the product and the license they activated: the end-user portal shows them their licenses and lets them activate one, and the words suite, offer and add-on appear nowhere they can see. So you can change how you sell without changing what they recognise.
Features are snapshotted at grant
Section titled “Features are snapshotted at grant”When a customer is granted an entitlement, its features are snapshotted — copied from the product as it is at that moment — and activating a license snapshots again into the session. So a license stays locked to what the product looked like when it was granted and activated; later edits don’t silently change it. See entitlements for why.