Users & Sessions

tiun supports two ways of representing who is using your product, depending on how they pay. One model centers on identified users; the other on billing sessions.

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Users (subscription model)

When you use subscriptions, tiun creates a user identity. Users are identified primarily by email. After they complete checkout or sign in, tiun exposes a user record that includes:

Concept	Role
userId	Stable identifier for that person in tiun
email	The address used for account and receipts
productAccess	Which product IDs this user is entitled to

That identity persists across browser sessions. When the same person returns on the same device, tiun can restore the session so you do not need to re-authenticate for every visit. Your UI can rely on the user object and entitlement checks staying in sync with what they have purchased.

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Sessions (time-based model)

Time-based billing does not expose a full user profile to your app through the SDK. When you call tiun.start(), the customer connects a payment method — via credit cards, Google Pay, Apple Pay, PayPal, or the tiun app — and tiun starts a billing session tied to that connection.

Behind the scenes, tiun extracts details about the user and their session. You can view this data in User Management on the tiun.business dashboard, but it is not exposed to the SDK or your snippet. From your app's perspective, sessions are anonymous.

Access is not expressed as "this email owns product X." Instead, you drive the experience through paywall events and content state (see Access model and Time-based billing). The session itself is the unit of "is this person currently allowed to use paid content?"

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When each applies

Product types	Identity model
Subscriptions	Users with email, userId, and productAccess
Time-based billing	Sessions — payment-linked, paywall-driven

Choose the model that matches your product. Subscriptions use the user object for entitlements; time-based areas use session lifecycle and paywall signals.