Case Study - BlackCloak

A New Pattern for Pricing and Packaging: BlackCloak’s Success Story with Schematic

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Jasdeep Garcha
·
07/02/2024

"We could either build or buy. We chose to buy from Schematic, and it’s been a game changer, allowing us to decouple critical business processes from engineering, significantly speeding up our ability to experiment and deliver new features to our customers." - Aaron Wise, CTO, BlackCloak

Customer Overview

BlackCloak is a leading B2B SaaS company specializing in digital executive protection. They provide cybersecurity and privacy solutions for high-profile executives, high-access employees, and high-net-worth individuals. Their platform combines digital privacy protection, personal device security, home network security, and incident response to safeguard clients' digital lives and corporate data.

Before Schematic

Before implementing Schematic, BlackCloak's pricing and packaging were managed through a combination of hard-coded entitlements and manual processes. This approach limited their ability to experiment with new pricing models and made entitlement management inefficient. The engineering team was a critical bottleneck for updates, causing delays in rolling out new features and supporting different plan levels. This setup forced BlackCloak to make trade-offs and scope initiatives narrowly, often resulting in incomplete solutions that required constant revisiting and adjustments.

Challenges

BlackCloak faced several key challenges before using Schematic:

  • Limited ability to experiment with different pricing and packaging models.

  • Manual and inefficient entitlement management processes.

  • Engineering team was a critical bottleneck for all pricing and packaging updates.

  • Difficulty supporting plan types and rolling out new features.

Solution

BlackCloak chose Schematic after evaluating their need for a platform to support experimentation and flexible entitlement management. Schematic provided a solution for feature management, entitlement management, and pricing and packaging operations, enabling business teams to manage entitlements independently and streamline release processes.

"The business wanted to continuously test out different ideas — how to price, package, and segment our offerings -, validate them, and respond accordingly. Without a platform to move quickly, it was a drag on engineering bandwidth. Schematic allowed us to implement a more sane and extensible pattern for entitlements and empower the business to do those things on their own." - Aaron Wise, CTO, BlackCloak

Outcomes

Deploying Schematic at BlackCloak resulted in:

  • Decoupled entitlements from application code.

  • Enabled business teams to manage entitlements without engineering involvement.

  • Allowed experimentation with new pricing and packaging models.

  • Streamlined release management with feature flagging capabilities.

  • Reduced manual processes and the ability to automate customer lifecycle.

Value Delivered

Implementing Schematic saved BlackCloak 2-3 full-time engineers and accelerated time to value for both new feature launches and new pricing & packaging. It simplified entitlement management, reducing support overhead and error-prone manual database manipulation. Overall, Schematic increased BlackCloak’s flexibility, allowing the business to respond quickly to market demands and support revenue growth without heavy engineering involvement, resulting in substantial cost savings.