SaaS Seat & Team Management: Unified Entitlement Across Organizations

Challenge

A company makes a project collaboration tool for engineering and construction firms. Customers pay per user. Their organisations have departments, project teams and lots of external people: subcontractors, architects, clients who need to look at a plan now and then.

Seats were a quantity on the customer’s Stripe subscription. Moving ten seats from one department to another meant a support ticket. External people needed a full paid seat even if they logged in twice a month, so customers shared logins instead, which nobody liked.

The vendor wanted two things: a seat count the customer’s admin could manage alone, and a cheaper way to let occasional guests in.

Approach

Each customer organisation is a licensee. The product has three modules:

Product: SiteCollab
├── Module "Plan" – Subscription
│   └── Year: TIMEVOLUME 1 YEAR
├── Module "Seats" – Quota
│   └── Seat pack: QUANTITY, quantity = 10
└── Module "Guest access" – Floating, maxCheckoutValidity = 3600 s
    └── Guest pool: FLOATING, maxSessions = 5

Named seats. Quota returns the number of seats an organisation has bought: the sum of all its active seat packs. Quota doesn’t count users. That’s deliberate, because only the collaboration tool knows who is a member. When an admin invites someone, the tool counts the organisation’s active members and compares that with the quota. How the admin spreads those seats across departments and teams is entirely up to them. Moving a seat from one team to another is a change in the tool, with no license involved, so nobody files a ticket.

Guests. External people don’t take a named seat. When a guest opens a shared project, the tool checks out a session from the Floating guest pool. When they leave, it checks the session back in. An organisation with a pool of five can have any number of invited guests, as long as no more than five are active at the same time. If a guest closes the browser without logging out, the session is freed after an hour.

Plan. A yearly Subscription keeps everything running, and its expires date is the organisation’s renewal date.

When an admin opens the member settings or invites someone, the tool validates the organisation:

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

The result contains the plan’s valid and expires, the seat quota, and the guest pool state. The member settings show “38 of 40 seats used”, which is the tool’s own count against NetLicensing’s quota.

A guest session is a separate, short call with productModuleNumber0, sessionId0 (the guest’s user ID plus the browser session) and action0=checkOut or checkIn.

Buying more

“Add seats” and “Add guest capacity” open the NetLicensing Shop with a shop token for the organisation. A new seat pack adds to the quota as soon as it’s bought, and a webhook on LICENSE_CREATED refreshes the tool’s cached result. Large customers with a framework contract get their seat packs created by the vendor’s sales team in the Management Console.

When a customer reduces seats at renewal, sales sets one seat pack to active=false. The quota drops, and the tool asks the admin to remove members until they’re within the new limit.

Results

• Admins manage named seats across teams themselves. The number they’ve paid for comes from NetLicensing.
• Occasional guests use a shared pool of concurrent sessions instead of paid named seats or shared logins.
• Buying more seats or guest capacity is self-service and takes effect immediately.
• Plan, seats and guests are checked with one validation per organisation.

Managing seats in a B2B product? See the SaaS licensing guide or contact us.