Core Concepts
Core Concepts
The Kaiten model in one diagram — who you sell to, what they bought, where your product runs for them, and how flags, usage, and events hang off the same records.
Kaiten holds one model of a SaaS business: what is sold, what is accessible, and what runs share the same records and the same keys. The commercial contract — a License granting Entitlements — is the source of truth, and everything operational attaches to it: the instance a customer runs, the flags evaluated for it, the usage it reports, the releases it receives. This page is the map. Each concept has its own page, and the exact tables, enums, and constraints live in the data model.
The model
Read it top-down. The Organization is you, the vendor. A Customer is a company you sell to. An Instance is one running copy of your product for that customer — the point where the contract meets the runtime. Exactly one License is attached to each instance, and the License grants Entitlements: typed rights such as a quota of monthly orders or the inclusion of delivery tracking. Feature flags are evaluated per instance and can read those grants. A Deployment zone is where the instance runs, and Releases land in zones.
The concepts
Customers & Instances — the commercial counterparty and the running copy of your product that carries its contract. The instance is where usage is recorded, flags are evaluated, and the audit trail is kept; its BYO-ID fields let it match your CRM without a mapping table.
Licenses & Entitlements — the contract side. A License is what a customer bought — one version of a product, its License family; an Entitlement is a typed right in your catalog (BOOLEAN, NUMBER, NUMBER_AI_CREDIT, CONFIG); the grant between them carries the value — Premium grants 1,000 monthly orders, Starter grants 20.
Usage & Metering — the observed side. Instances report consumption against their grants; Kaiten folds each report into a running total, pushes back at hard caps, emits threshold events, and resets periodic counters.
Feature Flags — OpenFeature-compatible flags with CEL targeting rules, evaluated per instance over OFREP. A rule can read the instance's license and entitlements directly, so a flag follows the contract without a flag edit.
Releases & Deployments — the runtime pillar. Versioned components are bundled into immutable releases; releases land in deployment zones; every landing is journaled; an instance runs whatever its zone currently runs.
Events & Webhooks — every change and every evaluation becomes a domain event, written in the same transaction as the change. Kaiten Cloud delivers them to managed webhook endpoints; a self-hosted stack consumes the event stream directly.
Metadata Fields — typed, JSON-Schema-validated properties you declare on instances and deployment zones. They render in the console, are enforced on every write, and are readable by targeting rules.
The audit trail — the append-only record of changes and evaluations, read per instance or for the whole organization. It answers "who had access to what, when?" with a filter.
Notifications — each user's view over that trail: the events worth telling a person about, with a read state and per-event preferences, in the console and over the API.
Vocabulary — the authority on terms: License (not Plan), Customer (not Tenant), Instance (not Deployment), Entitlement (not Feature) — and why each choice was made.
Exact reference: data model.