Overview
As your product evolves, so will its features and pricing. While it’s crucial to innovate and introduce changes for growth, it’s equally important to preserve trust and continuity for your existing customers.
Grandfathering item entitlements in Chargebee allows you to control how entitlement updates to your plans, features, and pricing are applied-whether exclusively for new customers or across your entire customer base. This flexibility ensures that you can drive business goals such as customer retention, adoption, acquisition, and operational efficiency without compromising on customer experience.
Example
As Acme Inc. expanded its online storage solutions, it needed to make key updates to its Basic Storage Plan without disrupting its existing customers' experience.
Adding New Features (Only for New Customers): Acme decided to introduce a "Priority Support" feature to enhance their Basic Storage Plan. However, they wanted this benefit to be available only to new customers signing up from June 2025 onward. Using Chargebee's Grandfathering Entitlements, Acme rolled out Priority Support without altering the experience of their existing Basic Plan subscribers, who continued enjoying the plan as they originally signed up for.
Removing Features (Only for New Customers): Later, Acme evaluated that integrating with a third-party service, such as Xero, was no longer strategic for entry-level users. They chose to stop offering the Xero integration for new customers purchasing the Go Plan, but thanks to grandfathering, existing Go Plan customers still retained access to Xero, preserving their original plan benefits.
Benefits of Using Grandfathering Entitlements
When you modify a plan by adding new features, changing pricing, or removing capabilities, you often face two distinct audiences:
- Existing Subscribers: Customers who expect consistency with what they originally signed up for.
- New Subscribers: Prospects who will experience the updated offerings.
Managing these two groups thoughtfully is key to:
- Maintaining Customer Trust: Preserve the experience promised to existing subscribers.
- Driving Product Adoption: Introduce new features to fresh sign-ups or upsell upgrades.
- Reducing Churn: Avoid surprising loyal customers with unexpected downgrades.
- Scaling Smoothly: Adjust pricing models, sunset old features, and optimize infrastructure without disruption.
Here’s how Chargebee’s grandfathering entitlements support your needs:
| Scenario | Business Goal | How Grandfathering Helps |
|---|---|---|
| Add a new feature to a plan, but only for new customers | Incentivize new customer acquisition | Allow only new subscriptions to access the new feature while keeping existing subscriptions unchanged |
| Add a new feature and make it available to both existing and new customers | Improve retention, drive adoption | Apply feature updates across all subscriptions, increasing customer value |
| Remove a feature from a plan, but only for new customers | Minimize churn, preserve loyalty | Existing subscriptions retain the feature; new subscriptions reflect the updated plan |
| Remove a feature for both existing and new customers | Optimize infrastructure, sunset unused features | Apply removal changes to all subscriptions with communication plans to manage the experience |
Note
Enabling Grandfathering imposes the following restrictions:
- Entitlement Transfer Configuration: Entitlement transfer configuration will not be supported for sites with Grandfathering enabled.
- Deprecated API Functionality: The following deprecated POST APIs will not function when Grandfathering is enabled:
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