Licensing a SaaS product

A B2B SaaS vendor selling tiered plans — seats, feature gates and a metered API quota — without building a licensing subsystem.

The setup: your backend holds the license; end users never see codes. Each customer has one entitlement, with seats for their users and meters for what they consume.

How the pieces map

You need	You use
Basic / Pro / Enterprise tiers	One plan set with three plans; each customer’s entitlement applies one
Feature gates per tier	Features snapshotted into the license — checked in-process, no per-request API call
Seat limits	A numeric feature (users.max) enforced by your app, or per-user activation with seat allocation
API call quotas	A monitored asset with a monthly quota and tier thresholds
Upgrade/downgrade, renewal, churn	Entitlement operations + Entitlement.* webhooks into your CRM

Integration sketch

1. Your backend embeds the .NET SDK (or calls REST directly). Each customer environment activates with StaticNodeId.Create(customerId) — a stable logical fingerprint, so restarts and autoscaled instances share one seat instead of leaking new ones.
2. Feature checks are local: the license is a signed token your process validates in memory. A request handler asking “is SSO enabled for this customer?” costs nothing.
3. Report API consumption in batches (UsageReporter.ReportAssetUsageAsync("api-calls.total", n)); the platform aggregates against the quota and fires MeteredUsage.OverageStatusChanged when a customer crosses Warning or hits their cap — your webhook receiver alerts sales to follow up.
4. Sales operations stay in the portal: new customer → new entitlement from an offer; upgrade → apply a different plan; churn → cancel, and the license stops validating at the next renewal.

Special cases are policies

Plan changes mid-period, usage aggregation windows, grace on renewal failure, “we promised customer X an exception” — in Oclavex these are policies on an entitlement, changed per customer without a deploy.

See it live: sign up and try Mirage — an AI media studio running this use case with metered hourly quotas, prepaid credits and an in-app plan upgrade, on a license issued to you.

Start with the API quickstart — the full loop, from first token to reading usage back, is eight calls.