
Ask HN: How do you implement and manage subscription plans in your SaaS app? - ksj2114
I&#x27;m looking for suggestions about how to create user facing plans and manage which features are available to them? To my knowledge Chargebee, Recurly, Stripe handle all the billing &#x2F; subscription management, but do I have to build all the logic around what features are available for which plans in my app, or is there a way to abstract this?<p>For reference, we currently use Stripe for billing, Firebase for authentication, Node.js on the backend, and React on the front end.
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pamonrails
It sounds like you are looking for an entitlement system[1]?

In my experience, none of the SaaS providers mentioned help you with this,
probably because it's very dependent on your product and business logic. Even
with Kill Bill, which has an entitlement system[2], some amount of coding
would be required to manage and enforce states like "max amount of users
reached for that plan" (the logic would be abstracted from the billing
though).

\- [1] [http://killbill.io/blog/subscriptions-entitlement-billing-
an...](http://killbill.io/blog/subscriptions-entitlement-billing-and-dunning/)
\- [2] [http://killbill.io/blog/blockingstate-
abstractions/](http://killbill.io/blog/blockingstate-abstractions/)

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Old_Thrashbarg
We use Chargebee (backed by Stripe). As far as I know, in terms making a page
that helps explain the different features available, none of these services
help with that. Chargebee does provide a hosted page, where you can have a
short description of each plan that the user will be able to see.

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ksj2114
It's not just the page, which would be nice. It's also all the logic in the
background that says - if I change my plans to support 3 users now instead of
5, all the product changes are abstracted away?

~~~
Old_Thrashbarg
Ah I see, well Chargebee would give a UI where the user can change from 3 -> 5
(pro-ration if they're in the middle of a cycle, generating invoices,
scheduling the change in the future if desired, etc). But how 5 instead of 3
licenses actually impacts your product, they don't help there, they just tell
you, OK this user has paid for 5 licenses now.

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tzm
Look into Authpack. Haven't used it, but it seems interesting.

[https://authpack.io](https://authpack.io)

