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3 Comments

How about Permissions-As-A-Service

A key part of growing a product is charging for it! Paying customers are paying for the future of the product.

The hardest part of my recent MVP release (https://keyringnow.com) was building the "premium" permissions feature.

It went something like this:

  • payment is collected
  • mark a user as "premium subscriber"
  • add a check for premium access when the user tries to use a premium feature.

If I want to add more features, or different access levels, I need to reimplement this, and make the different features play nice with one another.

I know Auth0 can capture this sort of thing, but it's probably a bit heavy handed for bootstrapped apps, right?

Would low-code/no-code founders use a SaaS that lets you:

  • mark a user as having "this access level" or "paid for this feature" (user.add_access("my_premium_feature_1"))
  • check for that access when user tries to do something (if user.has_access("my_premium_feature_1"...do action..)

It won't compete with Auth0 because it doesn't do identity management:

  • the app developer still manages creating user accounts
  • app developer still manages user AUTHENTICATION
  • it's intended just for asking "does this identity have access to this feature"

So it is far less powerful than Auth0 or Okta, but should be much easier to get up and running (and cheaper).

Maybe Firebase does this already and I'm just out of the loop. I love building frameworks so I think I'd enjoy building this...wanted to see if anyone thinks it'd be useful!

on June 21, 2020
  1. 2

    This is a key use-case for us at Warrant! As you said, implementing and managing user access to different pricing tiers can become complex pretty fast. We put together this guide showing how you can implement this easily through Warrant: https://docs.warrant.dev/guides/tiered-saas