Offer channels

An offer channel is a governed distribution path. It lets your workspace extend a controlled set of your offers to a partner organization, a private audience, or a beta cohort, without handing over your catalog or your billing. The channel decides which products it covers and which commercial terms every offer in it must follow. Channels exist for the cases a single shareable offer cannot express on its own: a reseller who distributes your products under terms you set, a closed relationship with named customers, or an early-access cohort that should run without charges. Each of those is a channel with its own policy.

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What a channel controls

A channel scopes the relationship before any offer is created: The channel is the durable relationship. The terms that govern it live in its channel policy.

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Channel policy: the gate every offer passes

Each channel carries a channel policy, a versioned set of rules every offer in the channel must satisfy before it can reach a customer:

• Pricing bounds. A default price with a minimum and maximum, in a fixed currency and billing interval. An offer in the channel can set its own price only within these bounds.
• Commercial mode. Whether the channel settles real paid charges, runs in non-billable test mode, or allows both.
• Approval. Whether paid offers (and test offers) go live automatically or require Akua approval first.
• Support visibility. What the partner can see about a customer’s installation, such as install state and app URLs. This defines the scoped support relationship between the partner and the customer.

The three gates in the hero above are three policies: an approval gate that holds a partner’s paid offers for review, price bounds that cap what a private channel can charge, and a no-charge test mode for a beta cohort.

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Policies are reviewed before they take effect

A channel policy is reviewed before it governs anything. It is drafted, approved, then activated, and only the active version applies to new offers. When you replace a policy, the previous version is archived and the new one takes its place. Nothing in a channel changes its terms without passing through that review. This is the same reviewed-proposal principle Akua applies elsewhere: a proposed change is validated and approved before it has any customer-visible effect.

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How channels relate to offers

When an offer is created inside a channel, the channel’s active policy resolves that offer’s commercial terms before it goes live:

• The commercial mode (paid or non-billable test).
• Whether checkout and payment are required.
• Whether the offer needs approval first.
• The effective price, drawn from the policy default or the offer’s own request, always within the policy’s bounds.
• The support scope the partner is granted for resulting installations.

If anything blocks the offer (a price outside the bounds, an approval still pending), the resolved terms say so before the offer reaches a customer. One channel can carry many offers this way, all held to the same reviewed terms. Everything downstream of the offer, including the order flow and paid checkout when enabled, works exactly as it does for a standalone offer.

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Availability

Offer channels are gated behind a restricted entitlement and are enabled per workspace by Akua. There is no self-serve setup and no public API surface for channels or channel policies today. If your workspace needs partner, private, or beta distribution under governed terms, contact support@akua.dev to request access and work through the channel and policy setup together.

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