🚸 Family Plans

A Family Plan is a group subscription that allows multiple users to receive access through a single paid subscription.

Despite the name, a Family Plan does not require participating users to be members of the same household or family unless your service and/or your licensing agreements enforce that requirement separately. Within the Tuned Global platform, it is primarily a subscription-sharing and billing relationship between independently registered users.

While the feature is commonly used for consumer Family Plans, the same capability can also be used for other group subscription models. For example, a Background Music Service may have a centrally billed organisation with multiple independently managed stores, each operating under the same subscription relationship.

In all cases, each participant retains their own user account, authentication credentials, profile, playback history, favourites, playlists and other user-specific data. Users do not share an account or user identity.

Relationship Model

A Family Plan consists of:

• one Plan Owner;
• one underlying paid subscription owned by the Plan Owner; and
• one or more Shared Users linked to that subscription.

The Plan Owner is the account that owns the subscription. Depending on the service, this may represent an individual consumer, a business or another billing entity.

The Plan Owner is responsible for the commercial relationship associated with the subscription, including payment, renewal, cancellation and management of the available shared-user positions.

A Shared User is an independent user who has been granted access to the service through the Plan Owner's subscription. A Shared User receives the applicable service entitlements but does not own the subscription and does not establish a separate billing relationship within the Tuned Global platform.

Conceptually, the relationship can be represented as:

The subscription is therefore shared, while the users and their accounts remain completely independent.

Plan Owner

The Plan Owner:

• owns the Family Plan subscription;
• is the account associated with the subscription's billing relationship;
• may generate invitation codes for other users;
• may view the users currently sharing the subscription; and
• may remove Shared Users from the plan.

The subscription response identifies this relationship through the UserId and OwnerId values. For a Plan Owner, these values will ordinarily refer to the same account.

Family Plan availability is identified by:

• AllowShare – Indicates whether the subscription can be shared.
• MaxSharedUsers – Identifies the maximum number of Shared Users supported by the subscription.

For standard consumer subscriptions, MaxSharedUsers is configured by Tuned Global at the subscription-plan level.

For enterprise use cases, such as Background Music Services, an additional API is available to dynamically configure the maximum number of Shared Users associated with a parent subscription, allowing capacity to be managed independently of the subscription-plan configuration.

Image below: An example of an UI implementation using the available APIs

Shared Users

A Shared User:

• maintains their own Tuned Global user account;
• is linked to the Plan Owner's subscription;
• receives access based on the entitlements of that subscription;
• does not have an independent subscription or billing relationship within the Tuned Global platform; and
• may remove themselves from the Family Plan.

Joining a Family Plan does not transfer ownership of the subscription to the Shared User.

A user cannot ordinarily join a Family Plan while they already have another active subscription. Their existing subscription must first be cancelled or otherwise made inactive before the Family Plan invitation can be accepted.

Invitations

The Plan Owner adds users by generating single-use invitation codes.

An invitation code:

• is associated with the Plan Owner's subscription;
• can be incorporated into a service-controlled invitation URL;
• expires once it has been accepted;
• expires after five (5) days if it is not used; and
• cannot be generated when no shared-user positions remain available.

The service should validate an invitation code before displaying the invitation acceptance flow.

When the invitation is accepted, the authenticated user is linked to the Plan Owner's subscription as a Shared User.

Invitation delivery, invitation-page user experience and any additional eligibility checks are managed by the implementing service.

Image below: An example of an UI implementation using the available APIs

Capacity and Plan Configuration

Tuned Global configures the absolute maximum number of Shared Users that may be associated with a subscription.

Services may choose to expose a lower limit as part of their own commercial offerings but cannot exceed the configured maximum represented by MaxSharedUsers.

The remaining invitation capacity can be retrieved through the invitation-code endpoint. When the returned Remaining value is 0, the interface should prevent the Plan Owner from generating additional invitation codes.

Removing a Shared User

A Shared User may be removed:

• by the Plan Owner; or
• by the Shared User themselves.

Removing a Shared User ends the relationship between that user and the shared subscription. It does not delete the user's account or transfer any account data to the Plan Owner.

After removal, the user no longer receives entitlements through the Family Plan unless they subsequently join another eligible subscription.

Integration Summary

A typical Family Plan implementation follows this lifecycle:

1. The Plan Owner purchases a Family Plan.
2. The service confirms that AllowShare is enabled and reads MaxSharedUsers.
3. The Plan Owner generates an invitation code.
4. The service sends or displays an invitation URL containing the invitation code.
5. The invited user signs in or creates their own account.
6. The service validates the invitation code.
7. The authenticated user accepts the invitation.
8. Tuned Global links the user to the Plan Owner's subscription.
9. The user receives the subscription's applicable entitlements as a Shared User.
10. Either the Plan Owner or the Shared User may later end the sharing relationship.

Relevant APIs

The Family Plan workflow uses the following API operations.

• Retrieve the user's subscriptions and Family Plan configuration
  • GET /api/v3/users/{id}/subscriptions
• Retrieve invitation codes and remaining invitation capacity
  • GET /api/v3/subscription/{id}/invitation-codes
• Retrieve users sharing a subscription
  • GET /api/v3/subscription/{id}/shared-by
• Validate an invitation code
  • POST /api/v3/subscription/validations/code
• Accept an invitation and link the authenticated user
  • POST /api/v3/subscription/invitations/{code}
• Remove a Shared User
  • DELETE /api/v3/subscription/{id}/shared-users/{userId}

Key Principle

A Family Plan is fundamentally a subscription relationship, not an account relationship.

It consists of a single billing and entitlement relationship that provides access to multiple independent user accounts.

The Plan Owner owns the subscription and the associated billing relationship. Shared Users receive entitlements through that subscription while maintaining their own identities, authentication credentials, profiles, playlists, favourites, playback history and all other personal account data.

This model allows the same capability to support both traditional consumer Family Plans and enterprise group subscription models without changing the underlying platform architecture.

Implementation Code

Tuned Global can provide full implementation code for Family Plans as part of it's Microsite codebase. As your accounts team for more information.