Chapter 12 — The Flex Program: BYO, Game Packs & Tiers
Attend onboarding guide · ~8 min read · ↑ Back to contents
A team doesn't just "turn on Flex." They configure a flex program — the top-level thing that everything else hangs off. A program decides the shape of the offer: can a fan pick any games they like, or only from fixed packs? How many must they buy? Is variety enforced? This chapter walks the three shapes a program can take.
The program is the container
Think of the flex program as the box that holds one team's whole Flex offer for a season: which class names it sells, its pricing, and — the part we care about here — its program type.
1. Build Your Own (BYO)
The most flexible shape: every event is on the table, flat, and the fan picks any combination they want. The team sets two guardrails:
- a minimum number of events (e.g. "pick at least 3"), and
- a maximum (e.g. "up to 10").
Most teams land around min 3, but it's a dial — some allow min 1 (maximally flexible), a rare few set min 20.
Example: the Warriors run a BYO program with min 3, max 10. A fan scrolls all 41 home games, hand-picks the 4 they can actually attend, and checks out. That's BYO.
2. Game Packs
Instead of a free-for-all, the team offers named packs — a "3-game pack," a "5-game pack," a "7-game pack." Events are mapped into each pack, and each pack has its own min/max.
The min/max here does real work: a 3-game pack might be set min 3, max 4 — high enough that a fan can't quietly buy 5 games through the cheaper 3-pack and skip the 5-pack pricing.
Example: the Warriors' 5-game pack maps in their 20 marquee home games. The fan must choose exactly 5 of those — no more, no less.
Tiers — forcing variety inside a pack
Packs have an optional twist: tiers. A team groups the pack's events into tiers to stop fans from cherry-picking only the cheap games:
- Tier 1 = rivalry / marquee games
- Tier 2 = mid-tier games
- Tier 3 = easy / low-demand games
Then they set min/max per tier — e.g. "pick at least 1 from each tier" — so every pack includes some of the harder-to-sell inventory, not just the blockbusters.
Example: the Warriors' 3-game pack requires 1 from Tier 1 (say, Lakers), 1 from Tier 2, and 1 from Tier 3. A fan can't build a pack of three rivalry games and ignore the rest.
A quirk worth knowing: tiers always exist within a game pack
Here's a detail that trips people up reading the data: inside a game-pack program, the backend always has tiers, even when a team doesn't use them. If a team picks "game pack only," Attend silently creates a dummy tier and maps every event into it — the UI just hides the tier layer when it isn't wanted. (BYO and Predefined programs have no tier layer at all.)
So if you see a tier you never configured, that's why. It's the plumbing, not a bug.
3. Predefined Packages 🟡 (backend built; authoring flow in progress)
The third shape removes fan choice entirely: the team pre-defines the exact events in a package — "Rivalry Pack = these 3 specific games" — and the fan simply buys the whole thing as-is.
- No picking, no min/max selection — the package is the package.
- It can offer post-purchase add-ons: after buying the package, the fan may tack on more events (with their own min/max).
- There's no tiers concept here — variety is already baked in by the team.
The backend is implemented — tbl_preset_packages, the catalog read path, and config validation
exist in both backends — so the code you'll see is real, not a placeholder. How complete the Cortex
authoring + fan-checkout flow is end-to-end is worth confirming with the team.
The three shapes at a glance
| Shape | Fan choice | Guardrails | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Build Your Own | pick any events | program min/max | ✅ |
| Game Packs | pick within a named pack | per-pack min/max (+ optional tiers) | ✅ |
| Predefined Packages | none — buy as defined | post-purchase add-ons | 🟡 backend built |
Recap
- A flex program is the top-level container for a team's Flex offer.
- BYO: all events flat, with a program-wide min/max.
- Game Packs: named packs with per-pack min/max; optional tiers force variety.
- Tiers always exist inside a game pack — a dummy tier is created when a team opts out; BYO and Predefined programs have no tier layer.
- Predefined Packages: fixed event lists, optional post-purchase add-ons, no tiers — backend implemented (authoring flow may still be in progress).
Next → Chapter 13 — Events & Venues