[akajla]

I've seen it implemented in exactly this fashion. You can even hook up Stripe (or any other checkout system) in such a way that a successful payment triggers the "feature upgrade" on the back-end and subsequent interactions with your app have the "pro/paid" features unlocked.

I also think that at its core, implementing tiers is an authorization problem, somewhat a hybrid of access control and feature flags. As mentioned above, frameworks like Laravel and Rails have built-in functionality that makes it easier to implement. Once you get to scale, I think the challenge becomes managing and changing the tiers themselves as new features are introduced and managing which customers have access to what (especially with custom pricing/contracts per customer).

Disclaimer: I'm a founder at Warrant, a company offering authz as a service. Given how close this is to authz, we've written specifically about pricing tiers: https://docs.warrant.dev/guides/tiered-saas