Show HN: We built an API to manage usage based entitlement logic
gater.dev
Most SaaS products start by tying feature access/entitlement directly to billing metadata (like Stripe plan IDs or Paddle SKUs). It works early on, but quickly becomes a problem when you need to:
- Launch or tweak pricing experiments - Handle usage-based logic (anyone building AI tools might resonate), add-ons, and trials - Fix entitlement issues caused by billing sync problems
gater solves for these by decoupling user entitlement logic from billing.
You define plans (we call these macros), features, usage limits, and custom rules via our dashboard or API.
Your app calls gater to determine what a user should be able to access, regardless of what billing provider or pricing model you use.
The benefits:
- Reduces engineering time spent maintaining pricing logic - Enables faster experimentation with pricing and packaging - Makes support more self-sufficient when billing and entitlements go wrong - Payment stack agnostic – works with Stripe, Paddle, Paypal, or a homegrown stack - Supports more than feature flags – usage caps, bundled features, add-ons, etc.
We originally built gater for our own projects to avoid rewriting complex feature access logic every time pricing model changes.
We've dogfooded this incessantly and hope this is also useful for other teas!
If you’ve had to battle entitlement logic implementation for your SaaS, we’d love to hear your thoughts or feedback.