Entitlements, explained

Somewhere in your codebase there is a line like if (customer.plan === "enterprise").

It worked when you had two plans. Then plans changed, a customer got a custom deal, marketing renamed a tier — and now nobody is quite sure what that line lets through. That line is a hand-rolled entitlement, and it's the reason changing your plans requires an engineering ticket.

What an entitlement is

An entitlement is the answer to one question: what is this customer allowed to do?

A plan isn't just a price — it's a bundle of permissions. Entitlements are those permissions, defined in one place, and they come in three shapes:

Switches — a feature is on or off. SSO on Enterprise: yes. SSO on Starter: no.
Limits — a feature is on, up to a number. Ten seats. Five projects. Three integrations.
Allowances — a metered feature with an included quota. 100,000 API calls a month, then overage.

Every "can they do this?" moment in your product resolves to one of these three.

How the check works

Instead of asking plan === "enterprise", your product asks the billing platform: can this customer use feature X? The platform looks at the customer's subscription, resolves their plan's entitlements (plus any customer-specific overrides), and answers — allowed, denied, or allowed-with-N-remaining.

That one indirection changes everything:

Plans become editable. Move a feature from Growth to Enterprise in the dashboard, and every customer's access updates. No deploy.
Custom deals stop being code. An enterprise customer negotiated 25 seats instead of 10? That's an override on their account, not an if statement with their customer ID in it.
The upsell happens at the gate. The moment a customer hits "upgrade to unlock" is the highest-intent moment in your product. Entitlements put it exactly where the desire is.

Entitlements and metering are two halves

In the previous article we said: metering counts, limits enforce. Entitlements are where the limits live.

Metering tells you a customer has used 100,000 calls. The entitlement says their plan includes 100,000 — and defines what happens next: block, warn, or bill the overage. Without entitlements, metering is just analytics. Without metering, entitlements can't enforce quotas. Together they're a pricing engine.

What this looks like in Tirdad

In Tirdad, entitlements are a first-class part of the catalog:

Features are defined once — as switches, limits, or metered allowances.
Plans bundle them: each plan carries its own set of entitlements over the same feature catalog.
Checks are one call — from the API or the SDKs. In the Next.js SDK it's a single hook: useHasFeature("sso").
Overrides handle custom deals per customer, without touching the plan.
Enforcement is automatic — caps and quotas are applied by the platform, with overage billed if that's what you choose.

Your product asks one question; billing answers it. The if (plan === ...) line retires.

This is billing, explained · 02 — one billing concept a week, in plain language. Previously: metered billing. Next up: proration.

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