License and entitlement for a vertical SaaS

The situation

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 wasn't measured 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.

What we did

A delivery pod took the licensing and entitlement workstream end to end, built to run inside Pithias's existing SaaS without disrupting live tenants.

Plans, seats and usage are held as settings, not code. Changing a plan or extending a trial is a configuration change the commercial team makes, not a code deploy. One place in the product decides whether a user can use a feature, so adding a new tier is a settings change, not a refactor. Measurement cheap enough to leave on all the time and fast enough that an admin sees current consumption in near real time.

A back office the vendor's commercial and customer success teams operate directly: tenant plans, trial extensions, limit overrides, ad hoc credits, an audit log answering "who authorised this." Grace handling for renewal lapses, so the tenant stays functional with the admin notified rather than cut off at midnight.

The shape of it

Two to three engineers over three to six months, delivered as a scoped pod inside Pithias's engineering process.

The outcome

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.