Glossary

Core objects

• Entitlement — the stable access key your app checks (e.g. pro). What your code gates on.
• Entitlement Grant — the derived result that makes an entitlement active for a subject. Never edited directly.
• Commercial entitlement state — whether the requested entitlement has an active derived grant, independent of installation recovery.
• Effective Access decision — the authoritative feature-gate union that combines the requested entitlement, installation/device authorization, and bounded offline evidence. Only granted unlocks.
• Device recovery — a device_blocked Effective Access state with a typed reason and recovery path; it is not an inactive purchase.
• Access Source — verified normalization of a commerce object for the access domain.
• Access Pool — the capacity of a source; capacity 1 for a single subscription, N for a seat contract.
• Reservation — capacity held for an open invitation before it is claimed.
• Allocation — an assignment of pool capacity to an access subject.

Subjects

• App User — an end user of your product. The public product term.
• Organization — a group subject (e.g. a club) that receives distributed access.
• Access Subject — the recipient of access; an app user or organization.
• Billing Account — the tenant-scoped commercial identity. It can participate as payer, contract holder, sponsor, or previous payer and remains distinct from every access subject.
• Payer — the billing account that funds a purchase or contract.
• Contract Holder — the billing account that legally or operationally holds a contract. It may be the same row as the payer, but the role stays explicit.
• Licensee — the organization access subject that holds an organization license. A licensee relationship does not itself allocate capacity or grant an entitlement.
• Recipient — the app-user or organization subject receiving an allocation or benefiting from an entitlement grant.
• Store Lineage — a system-managed subject for portable Apple/Google ownership history. It is never silently merged with an app user.
• Lifecycle Event — one append-only, provider-neutral explanation of an evidenced business or support change. It never grants access.
• Participation — a role-bearing link from one lifecycle event to a subject or billing account, allowing one canonical event to appear in several customer views.
• Console / operator user — a user of the SubKit console and an actor in audit evidence, not an app user.

Catalog

• Product — a sellable thing; carries no store IDs or prices itself.
• Plan — a product’s mandatory term/capacity/entitlement configuration.
• Plan Version — an immutable published snapshot of a plan.
• Offering — the runtime paywall grouping an app renders.
• Store Binding — the link to a concrete Apple/Google product or offer.

Keys

• SDK key (sk_sdk_…) — public, app-bound, used in mobile apps. Cannot mutate commerce or access.
• Server key (sk_srv_…) — capability-scoped, used only in trusted backends.
• accessContext — a short-lived signed token binding reads to a provider-verified store environment.

Terms to use, and avoid

• Use “App User” as the product and technical term for an end user.
• License / Lizenz stays product and contract language, but is not a generic technical root object. Access is modeled as sources, pools, allocations, and grants — not as a root “license” record.
• Do not phrase app checks as “has a subscription/license”. Name entitlement X in the Effective Access API and gate on its granted decision.