Entitlements Are a Domain, Not a Feature Flag

It usually starts with one feature. The product team wants the new reporting dashboard available only on the enterprise plan, and there's no plan model in the code yet. The flag service is already wired in and supports targeting, and a segment called enterprise-customers takes ten minutes to set up. A year later there are a dozen such segments. Every grant now goes through engineering, the code understands plans only as segment names, billing and access drift apart, and change logs are not sufficient to audit the proper state of customer product access.