B2B SaaS: From Stripe-Only to Licensing-as-a-Service

Challenge

A company sells contract review and document assembly software to legal and HR teams. Billing runs on Stripe subscriptions, and that part works well: cards, invoices, dunning and tax are all handled.

What Stripe doesn’t know is which features a customer may use. That knowledge ended up scattered across the codebase. The API gateway checked the plan name, the UI checked a flag in the user table, and the AI clause analysis checked something else again. After a downgrade, some features stayed open. After a failed payment, some closed too early. Trials were a date column that only one service read.

The team didn’t want to give up Stripe. They wanted one entitlement source that every part of the product asks.

Approach

Stripe stays in charge of money. NetLicensing becomes the place that decides what a customer may use. Each customer account is a licensee, and the vendor uses its own account ID as the licensee number.

Product: DocSuite
├── Module "Access" – Subscription
│   ├── Trial: TIMEVOLUME 14 DAY, price 0, automatic
│   ├── Month: TIMEVOLUME 1 MONTH
│   └── Grace: TIMEVOLUME 7 DAY, hidden, grace period
└── Module "Features" – Multi-Feature
    └── FEATURE templates: TEMPLATES-LIB, AI-REVIEW, E-SIGN, SSO-CONNECTOR

Subscription answers “may this account use the product today?”. Multi-Feature answers “which add-ons does it have?”. Every new licensee gets the automatic 14-day trial, which starts at its first validation.

Stripe events drive the licenses

The vendor’s back end already receives Stripe webhooks. It now also calls NetLicensing, using an API key with the role ROLE_APIKEY_OPERATION that never leaves the server:

For example, when an invoice is paid:

curl -u apiKey:SERVER_API_KEY -H "Accept: application/json" \
  -d "licenseeNumber=ACC-30917" \
  -d "licenseTemplateNumber=ACCESS-MONTH" \
  -d "startDate=2026-11-14T00:00:00Z" \
  -d "stripeInvoice=in_1Q2w3E4r" \
  https://go.netlicensing.io/core/v2/rest/license

stripeInvoice isn’t a NetLicensing field. Any extra form field is saved as a custom property on the license, so support can see which invoice a license belongs to. Stripe can deliver the same event twice, so the handler records the event ID and skips duplicates.

When a payment fails, Stripe retries for a few days. The Subscription module’s grace period keeps the customer working during that time, instead of cutting them off the moment a period ends.

One check for the whole product

Every service asks the same question in the same way:

curl -u apiKey:SERVER_API_KEY -H "Accept: application/json" -X POST \
  https://go.netlicensing.io/core/v2/rest/licensee/ACC-30917/validate

For “Access” the result holds valid and expires. For “Features” it lists each add-on with valid=true or false. The back end caches the answer until its ttl and drops it whenever the Stripe webhook handler has changed something for that account. The old scattered checks are gone. The gateway, the UI and the AI service all read the same entitlements object.

Results

• Stripe still handles payments, invoices and taxes. NetLicensing is the one place that decides what a customer may use.
• Downgrades and cancellations take effect exactly when the Stripe event arrives, and nothing stays open by accident.
• Trials, renewals and grace periods follow the same rules for every customer.
• Support can open a customer in the Management Console and see every license, its dates and the Stripe invoice behind it.

Running on another billing system? The same pattern works with any service that sends webhooks. See using NetLicensing with subscription management services, or get in touch.