When you're moving fast, it's tempting to gate features with a simple if:

It works. Until it doesn’t.

As your product evolves, those if-statements start popping up everywhere. One in the frontend, three in the backend, maybe one deep inside your analytics service. Suddenly, no one’s quite sure where the access logic lives — or what happens if you change your pricing.

Welcome to if-statement hell.

Why It Gets Messy Fast

At first, it’s harmless:

• One feature, two plans. Easy logic.

• A single check in your UI.

But then:

• Marketing wants to A/B test pricing.

• Sales wants custom access for enterprise accounts.

• Product wants to launch usage-based billing.

• Support needs to know exactly what someone should have access to.

Now that single check turns into a jungle of:

• Role + plan + usage conditionals

• “Temporary” overrides that never get removed

• Fragile logic that breaks when someone upgrades or churns

And worst of all? You’re stuck reverse-engineering your own monetization model from scattered logic across your codebase.

What You Actually Want

You want to be able to ask a single question:

“Does this user have access to X?”

And you want the answer to be accurate, fast, and decoupled from your UI and business logic.

That’s what an entitlement system gives you - a clean interface between your pricing model and your product logic.

A Better Way: Entitlements as a Service

Instead of checking a user's plan everywhere, ask your backend:

Behind the scenes, this can handle:

• Plan rules

• Custom exceptions

• Usage-based limits

• Real-time syncing with Stripe

It’s cleaner, more scalable, and way easier to maintain.

How We Help at Monetization.dev

We built Monetization.dev to make this easy:

• Sync products, prices, and subscriptions from Stripe

• Map those to entitlements in plain English

• Validate access with a single API call

• No more scattered logic, just clear answers

Whether you're just launching or scaling fast, you shouldn't need to rebuild monetization infrastructure every time your pricing changes.

Final Thought

If you’re using if-statements to gate access today — that’s fine. It’s how most of us start.

But if your team is growing, your product is evolving, or your pricing is about to get more complex… those little checks will come back to bite you.

Let us help you clean it up - and keep it that way.