Feature Gating

The practice of restricting features to higher pricing tiers, often unrelated to underlying cost.

Common gated features include SSO, audit logs, SCIM provisioning, SLA guarantees, and dedicated support. The classic example is the SSO tax: vendors put SSO behind the highest tier, which can mean paying 3x for a feature that costs the vendor nothing extra. Procurement teams push back by negotiating feature unlocks separately from tier upgrades, especially for enterprise security features.