Features

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What is a Feature?

In ParityDeals, a Feature is a distinct piece of functionality in your product that can be packaged, monetized, and controlled. It is the core capability that you offer to your users. Think of features as the “nouns” of your product, such as:

• “Premium Analytics”
• “API Access”
• “Team Seats”
• “Dark Mode”

While a feature is the thing itself, an Entitlement is the rule that grants that feature to a customer as part of a Plan. The entitlement defines how a plan gets access to a feature—whether it’s turned on or off, or available up to a certain limit.

This guide focuses on creating and managing the features themselves, which are the fundamental building blocks of your entire monetization strategy.

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Creating a Feature

You can create and manage all features from one central location.

1. From the main sidebar, navigate to Product Catalog > Features.
2. Click the ”+ Create feature” button in the top-right corner.

3. In the “Create feature” modal, fill in the following primary details:

   • Feature name: A customer-friendly name. Think of this as the default label your customers will see in paywalls and other UIs.
   • Identifier: A unique ID used to reference this feature in your code. This is auto-generated from the name but can be overridden at the time of creation.
   • Description (optional): An internal description for your team’s reference.

4. Select a Feature type, which determines how access and usage of the feature are controlled.

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Feature Types

ParityDeals supports three types of features to model any business logic.

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Switch / Boolean

A Switch feature is for simple, all-or-nothing access. It’s perfect for functionality that doesn’t have a quantity associated with it.

• Examples: “Enable Single Sign-On (SSO),” “Access to Advanced Reporting,” “White-labeling.”

To create one, select Switch/boolean as the feature type and click “Create”.

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Customizable

A Customizable feature grants access up to a specific numeric limit that you define when adding it to a plan.

• Examples: Maximum number of team members, projects, or connected accounts.

To create one, select Customizable as the feature type.

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Feature Units

For Customizable and Metered features, you can define how the unit of value is described to customers.

• Click the pencil icon next to the “Feature unit” field.
• Enter the singular and plural forms (e.g., “Project” and “Projects”). This ensures the unit is displayed grammatically correct in all UIs.

After configuring units, click “Create”.

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Metered

A Metered feature is for anything you want to bill based on consumption. This is the foundation of usage-based billing. ParityDeals supports two ways to track usage:

• Pre-aggregated usage: Your application sends ParityDeals a total usage count periodically. Think of this as telling us the final score of a game.
• Raw events: Your application sends individual events as they happen, and ParityDeals aggregates them for you. This is like sending us the play-by-play so we can calculate the score.

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Pre-aggregated Usage

Select this option when your system already calculates total usage for a user.

1. Select Metered as the feature type, then choose Pre-aggregated usage.
2. Optionally, customize the initial Feature unit (singular/plural).
3. You can also toggle on “Use different feature units for customers”. When this is enabled, it reveals options to edit the base Feature unit (e.g., call/calls), a customer-facing Customer unit value (e.g., k call/k calls), and the Internal unit conversion rate between them. For a detailed explanation of how this conversion works, refer to the “Understanding Unit Conversion” section.
4. Click “Create” to finish.

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Raw Usage

Select this option when you want ParityDeals to calculate usage totals based on an event stream. The creation process involves several key stages:

1. Select Metered as the feature type, then choose Raw usage.

2. Optionally, customize the initial Feature unit. You can also toggle on “Use different feature units for customers” to reveal and set the base Feature unit, a customer-facing Customer unit value, and the Internal unit conversion rate.

3. Click “Continue”. This will take you to the event configuration screen.

4. Define Event Filters: Specify which events should count towards usage. You can filter by event name and add other properties from the event payload.

   • Conditions inside a single filter group must all be true (AND).
   • You can add more filter groups. An event only needs to match one of these entire groups (OR).

5. Configure Aggregation: Specify how ParityDeals should calculate a single value from the filtered events. All methods besides Count require you to select an event property to aggregate.

   • Example: To bill for data transfer, you could Sum the value of the bytes_transferred property on each event.

6. Click “Create” to save the feature and its aggregation rules. You will see a success screen.

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Understanding Unit Conversion

For metered features, you can present usage to customers in a more readable format than what you use for internal tracking. For example, you might track usage by the call but want customers to see their usage and pricing in terms of thousands of calls.

The relationship and flow of data for unit conversion can be visualized as:

To do this, toggle on “Use different feature units for customers” during feature creation or editing. This reveals three key fields to configure this relationship:

• Feature unit: This is the base unit that your system reports to ParityDeals (e.g., singular call, plural calls).
• Customer unit value: This is the customer-facing unit name (e.g., singular k call, plural k calls).
• Internal unit conversion: This is the conversion rate. For example: 1 customer-facing “k call” equals 1000 base “calls”.

When this setup is enabled, your system reports usage to ParityDeals in the base unit (calls), but all displays within ParityDeals (like paywalls and customer portals) and data sent to billing systems will use the customer-facing unit (k calls).

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Managing Features

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Archiving Features

When you no longer want to offer a feature to new customers, you can archive it.

When a feature is archived:

• It will no longer appear in the main feature list.
• It cannot be added to any new plans or add-ons.
• Existing customers who already have the feature through an active subscription will not be affected.
• The feature’s unique identifier is still considered “in-use” and cannot be used for a new feature.

To archive a feature, click the three-dot menu from the feature list and select “Archive”. Confirm the action in the dialog.