Use case
You sell to teams, and your app only knows users
A company buys one plan for its whole team. The person who pays, the colleagues they bring in and the usage they share should all count as one customer, but sign-in knows people and billing knows a customer ID.
What goes wrong
Where team plans break
- 01
The user is the customer
The subscription hangs off the account that paid. A colleague signs in and finds no plan, so the team buys it twice or shares one login.
- 02
Every member gets the whole allowance
Usage is counted per user, so a team of five gets five times what it bought, or each member sees a different amount left.
- 03
The invited colleague lands outside
Signing up from an invitation creates a new account with a team of its own, and someone has to move it into the right one by hand.
In ShipRev
Where this lives in ShipRev
The organization is the customer
When an end user signs up without an invitation, ShipRev creates their account and a buyer organization they belong to. The organization is what subscribes, so the plan belongs to the team rather than to whoever paid.
Invited colleagues join the team
The buyer invites colleagues by email. Someone who signs up from an invitation joins the inviting organization and gets none of their own, and someone who belongs to several organizations switches between them through the API.
One allowance for the whole team
Your backend rules and reports usage for the organization named in the member's session. What one member uses, every member sees used, against the same limit.
How to set it up
From one buyer to a whole team
Define a plan the team shares
Publish a plan whose allowance belongs to the organization, then follow the whole task end to end.
Sell team plans to business buyersLet the buyer sign up
Choose how end users sign in and turn on self sign-up. The first sign-up creates the customer's organization.
Sign-in methodsLet the team join
Invite colleagues by email; they join the organization from the invitation.
Buyer organizationsRule for the organization
Verify the member's session, then rule on capabilities and report usage with the organization it names.
Sessions and tokensWhere it stands
What is built, and what is not
ShipRev is not open yet: the managed cloud is built but not yet open, and the source repository is not public.
Buyer organizations
Created at sign-up, with the person who signed up in it.
Invitations and switching
Invite, accept, remove, and switch between organizations, through the API.
Rulings per organization
From the Server SDK for Node.js, with the balance the whole team shares.
Enterprise single sign-on
SAML and OIDC connections to a customer's own identity provider.
Server SDKs for other languages
The Server SDK is for Node.js only.