PRD Template for Subscription

Example: "28% of our paying customers have contacted support to change their subscription plan because the self-service upgrade/downgrade flow is confusing. Our involuntary churn (failed payments leading to account suspension) is 4.8%, significantly above the SaaS benchmark of 2-3%. The cancellation flow currently requires emailing support, which delays churn but generates 40+ support tickets per month and negative reviews citing hostile retention practices."

Example: "Primary: Reduce involuntary churn from 4.8% to under 2.5% through improved dunning flows. Self-service: 100% of plan changes (upgrade, downgrade, cancellation) must be completable without contacting support. Transparency: Users must understand their next billing date, amount, and what they get at each tier before making a change. Expansion: Increase upgrade rate from 8% to 15% by surfacing usage limits and upgrade prompts at the right moment."

Example: "As a team admin, I want to upgrade our plan when we exceed our current seat limit so that new team members can be added immediately. Acceptance criteria: the system shows a clear prompt when the seat limit is reached; the upgrade preview shows the price difference, prorated charge, and new features unlocked; the upgrade takes effect immediately; existing data and settings are preserved."

Example: "FR-1: The pricing page must display all plans with features, limits, and pricing (monthly and annual). FR-2: Upgrades take effect immediately with a prorated charge for the remaining billing period. FR-3: Downgrades take effect at the end of the current billing period — the user retains higher-tier access until then. FR-4: Cancellation must be self-service with a 3-step flow: reason selection, retention offer (if applicable), and confirmation. FR-5: The system must display a usage dashboard showing current usage against plan limits for each metered feature. FR-6: When usage reaches 80% of a plan limit, the system must display an upgrade prompt with the next tier's details."

Example: "NFR-1: Subscription changes must be atomic — either the plan change and the payment succeed together, or neither takes effect. NFR-2: Feature access changes must propagate within 10 seconds of a subscription change. NFR-3: All subscription events must be logged in an immutable audit trail. NFR-4: The system must handle webhook delivery failures from the payment processor with retry logic. NFR-5: Subscription state must be the single source of truth for feature gating — no cached plan data that could become stale."

Example: "Metric 1: Involuntary churn rate. Baseline: 4.8%. Target: under 2.5%. Metric 2: Self-service plan change rate. Baseline: 72% (28% via support). Target: 98%+. Metric 3: Upgrade conversion rate. Baseline: 8%. Target: 15%. Metric 4: Subscription-related support tickets. Baseline: 40/month. Target: under 10/month. Metric 5: Trial-to-paid conversion rate. Baseline: 14%. Target: 22%."

Example: "Subscription state will be managed by Stripe Billing as the source of truth. Our application stores a reference to the Stripe subscription ID and syncs plan details via webhooks. Feature gating reads the current plan from our database (synced from Stripe), not from the Stripe API directly (to avoid latency and rate limits). Dunning uses Stripe's Smart Retries with custom email templates for each retry attempt. The pricing page is driven by a configuration file that maps plan IDs to feature flags, making it easy to update pricing without code changes."

Example: "Risk: Feature gating bug allows free users to access paid features. Likelihood: Medium. Impact: High (revenue leakage). Mitigation: Centralized feature gating function with comprehensive unit tests covering every plan-feature combination. Automated daily audit comparing active features against subscription records. Risk: Downgrade does not properly revoke access to higher-tier features. Likelihood: Medium. Impact: Medium. Mitigation: Downgrade triggers a feature audit job that verifies access levels match the new plan."