Effective rights should survive catalog change
Why the License Platform materializes append-only entitlement snapshots instead of calculating customer rights from mutable catalog rows on every read.
Commercial state is not technical right
Subscription describes the commercial relationship. Entitlement describes the effective technical rights derived from a specific plan version and policy state. Keeping those concepts separate makes later licensing and enforcement behavior reproducible.
Snapshot instead of live join
The accepted model stores immutable entitlement snapshots and copied snapshot items at materialization time. Current rights are the latest snapshot plus active overrides; historical rights can be reconstructed as of an earlier point without assuming the catalog stayed unchanged.
No cache before a measured need
The Phase 3 decision deliberately avoids Redis or an in-process entitlement cache. Indexed snapshot and override reads are already bounded, and a cache would optimize a hot path that did not yet exist.