Jeli is an incident analysis platform that allows users to respond to, manage, and analyze incidents in order to build more resilient infrastructure and teams. For Jeli’s story with Stigg, we sat down with Fischer Jemison, the Backend Software Engineer who is leading the entitlement infra at Jeli.
The Jeli team was getting ready for their launch on ProductHunt. Part of the launch should include an update in their current pricing.
Jeli’s internal system wasn’t sufficient
About a year ago, Jeli had launched free trials. “We’ve deliberately built the system we knew wasn’t gonna last longer than a year.” Fischer said. That system was a basic list of hardcoded rules in Jeli’s backend that looked at the state of customer data and determined a customer’s access to entitlements.
As soon as the company started talking about a new pricing tier and a new trial, the engineering team knew they had to build something new.
“We had a very challenging deadline with the ProductHunt launch coming up. I didn’t want to cut the scope of this project or make product sacrifices. So, we’ve put out a call for vendor recommendations.” Fischer remembers.
Why Jeli chose Stigg
To adopt a new vendor, Jeli’s engineering team runs a short proof-of-concept (POC) in a dedicated sandbox, first. The team's goal for this project was to create two entitlements to check Stigg’s capabilities.
“We immediately had a great experience with Stigg. So much so, we didn’t need to even pull in more vendors. I expected to complete our POC project in 3-4 days. We completed it on the first day. That’s when we knew, Stigg is gonna meet our needs.”.
Jeli decided to implement Stigg and was able to launch their new pricing for ProductHunt.
"Stigg made it possible for us to roll out the new pricing tiers in the timeline that we had. If we had to spend time building an internal entitlements engine, we just wouldn’t have made the deadline."
Stigg made it possible for us to roll out the new pricing tiers in the timeline that we had. If we had to spend time building an internal entitlements engine, we just wouldn’t have made the deadline.
In addition to meeting their deadline, the team was also able to roll out the new pricing without any major customer-affecting bugs. “The stability of the Stigg platform was a big part of that. If we had to take care of how we are evaluating and shipping entitlements, and also deal with debugging our internal entitlement system, that would have hugely prolonged this project. Instead, we had a really smooth launch.”
From that moment, Stigg became Jeli’s entitlement backend. All of Jeli’s backend and frontend services use Stigg as their source of truth for customer states and customer entitlements.
“One thing we really like about Stigg is that it saved us the work of having to build an API on how to pass structured data about entitlements around. One of those things that are very complex and also not a core competency for Jeli.”
One thing we really like about Stigg is that it saved us the work of having to build an API on how to pass structured data about entitlements around. One of those things that are very complex and also not a core competency for Jeli.
Saving tons of engineering time on maintenance
Besides building an internal entitlement system, Fischer estimates a lot of engineering time that would have gone into maintaining this system. “We would have been dealing with a lot of ongoing maintenance, aka ongoing costs.” Fischer said. “That’s a lot of time spent on pricing projects, where now we can parallelize efforts and focus on pushing other projects out, instead.”
Prior to Stigg, Fischer was the sole source of truth for Jeli’s entitlements. This meant, every engineer had to consult with him before running any updates on their entitlements.
“With one of the recent PRs going out is, I realized what a big deal it is that we’re not relying on internal domain knowledge for entitlements anymore. One of our engineers just read Stigg’s docs and got an entitlement out.”
From blocker to enabler
The Jeli team is now looking into using more of Stigg’s capabilities, like integrating Stigg’s snap-in paywalls and granting customer-facing teams access to the admin console to manage customers and extend trials.
“A couple of weeks ago in a status meeting, we were talking about entitlements. I told someone ‘I think all things are possible through the power of Stigg’ and they told me ‘That’s the kind of quote that we would absolutely kill to get about our product’.”
With Stigg, the Jeli team feels prepared for any future pricing initiative.
“We want to be able to do more complicated things with customer subscriptions. It’s really valuable that engineering doesn’t have to be a blocker for that anymore.”
We want to be able to do more complicated things with customer subscriptions. It’s really valuable that engineering doesn’t have to be a blocker for that anymore.
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