Grandfathering Entitlements

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

Grandfathering included usage for metered features

Changes to the included usage of a metered feature on a plan or non-metered addon follow the grandfathering model by default, regardless of the site-level grandfathering setting. The change applies only to new subscriptions, and existing subscriptions keep their current included usage. To apply a change to existing subscriptions too, see Can you edit the entitlements of a plan or addon after linking a metered feature?

Before you enable grandfathering entitlements

Check how your site uses the following, because they work differently once grandfathering is enabled:

Transfer Configurations: Sites with grandfathering enabled don't transfer entitlement configurations through Transfer Configurations.
Product bundling: Product bundling with entitlements requires grandfathering to be disabled.
Deprecated item entitlement APIs: The following deprecated POST APIs don't work when grandfathering is enabled:
- Upsert or Remove Item Entitlements for a Feature
- Upsert or Remove Item Entitlements for an Item

To enable grandfathering, see Item Entitlements Grandfathering.