Setup Considerations: package structure

What this achieves

The set of packages you publish decides what every customer can buy and how much hand-set arrangement the platform needs afterwards. Getting the boundaries right at the start is cheaper than moving them once workspaces are sitting on them.

Decision: how many packages

Every package is a set to maintain: its capabilities, its prices, its quotas, and its position in the ladder. Two packages that differ by one capability are two things to keep in step for as long as both exist.

A ladder people can hold in their head is one where each step answers a different question — a free entry point, a working plan, a plan for larger organisations, and terms for anyone whose requirements are genuinely bespoke.

Example: if the only difference between two published packages is a single reporting capability, that is a candidate for one package plus an override on the few workspaces that need the extra, rather than a permanent second package.

Decision: where the tier boundaries sit

The tier rank is not cosmetic. It decides direction of travel, and direction decides who is allowed to make the change:

Decision	What it produces
A move to a higher rank	An immediate upgrade the customer makes themselves.
A move to a lower rank	A downgrade request that arrives for review before anything happens.

Rank packages so that the ladder reads the way your commercial team would describe it out loud. A package ranked out of order makes a real downgrade behave as a self-serve upgrade, which is a commercial decision made by a field value.

Decision: capability sets versus overrides

Two ways exist to give one customer something extra, and they age differently.

Decision	Cost of changing later
Put it in a package	Low per customer, but it becomes another package to maintain forever, and every future customer sees it in the ladder.
Grant it as a per-workspace override	Low to set up, but invisible in the package list. A workspace carrying several overrides no longer matches any published plan, and only its record says so.

Overrides are the right tool for a handful of exceptions and the wrong one for a pattern. When several workspaces carry the same override, that is the signal that the package set is missing a step.

Example: three customers each granted the same capability on top of the same package is not three exceptions. It is a package that should include it.

Decision: what a package change costs once customers are on it

A published package is not a document. Workspaces are subscribed against it.

Decision	Cost of changing later
Renaming or re-describing	Low.
Reordering the ladder	Medium. It changes which moves count as upgrades and which go to review.
Changing capabilities or prices	High. The safe route is to clone the package, change the copy, and let existing customers stay on what they bought.
Deleting	Not possible while any workspace is on the package, and not possible for the default. Hiding it retires it from sale instead.

Retire rather than delete. A hidden or deprecated package stops appearing to new customers and keeps working for the ones already there, which is what you want in every case except a package nobody ever bought.

Decision: which package new workspaces land on

Exactly one package is the default, and it is what a newly created workspace gets before anyone assigns anything. Make it the one that is safe to be wrong about: a customer who has been put on the default and should have been on something larger is a quick fix, and a customer given more than they bought is a commercial conversation.

Decision: quotas and the free tier

Structural quotas — how many legal entities, how many payroll countries — are limits on a capability the package already includes. They are not a way to withhold something. Where a package should not offer a capability at all, leave the capability out; a quota of zero is not the mechanism for it.

The employee count behaves differently between tiers. On the free tier the included seats are a hard cap. On paid packages there is no cap, and employees beyond the included seats bill as overage. Decide the included-seat figure knowing which of those two behaviours it drives.

What happens next

Once the ladder is settled, the work moves to individual workspaces: assigning a package, and granting the occasional override where an agreement genuinely differs from the plan. Watch the overrides. They are the earliest evidence that the ladder needs another step.