Upgrading to Plus and Pro

This guide is for sites already running Siren that want to move up a tier to adopt collaborator groups and cascades. It explains what each tier adds, confirms that your current configuration carries over untouched, and walks through the path to start using groups and cascades once you upgrade.

If you are coming from a different affiliate plugin rather than upgrading an existing Siren install, start with the Migration Overview instead.

To move up a tier, see the plans on the Siren product page and upgrade your license there. This guide covers what changes once you have done that.

The four tiers

Siren ships in four tiers that build on each other: Lite, Essentials, Plus, and Pro. Each tier is cumulative. Plus includes everything in Lite and Essentials, and Pro includes everything in Lite, Essentials, and Plus, then adds the next layer of capability on top.

Because the tiers are additive, upgrading never removes a feature you already use. Everything that worked on your current tier continues to work after you upgrade. The new tier only adds capabilities, it does not change the ones you already have.

What Plus adds: collaborator groups

Plus introduces the collaborator group as a first-class concept. A collaborator group is a named set of collaborators that you can bind to a program or a distributor. Binding a group to a program makes every member of that group eligible for the program, so you manage eligibility by editing group membership instead of enrolling collaborators one at a time.

At the Plus tier, collaborator groups use the flat structure. A flat group is an unordered set of members with no hierarchy between them. Every member is eligible for whatever the group is bound to, and there is no notion of one member sitting above or below another.

Plus owns the parts of the collaborator group system that do not depend on hierarchy:

• The collaborator group itself and the storage behind it.
• The flat structure.
• The bindings that connect a group to a program or a distributor, which gate eligibility through group membership.

This is enough to manage eligibility by group. It is not enough to run a cascade, because a cascade needs members arranged in a hierarchy. That arrives in Pro.

What Pro adds: hierarchy and cascades

Pro adds the hierarchical structures and the cascade calculations that operate over them.

A flat group has no layers, so there is no direction to walk and nothing to credit beyond the member who triggered the event. Pro changes that by adding two ordered structures:

• Linear chain, where members are arranged in a single ordered line by position.
• Parent-child, where members are arranged in a tree by depth.

Both of these structures provide layers, which is what makes a cascade possible. A cascade walks a hierarchical group and credits the triggering collaborator’s peers layer by layer, in a chosen direction. Walking toward the top of the chain is an upline cascade. Walking toward the leaves is a downline cascade. The triggering collaborator is never credited by the cascade itself.

Pro provides the cascade calculation strategies on both sides of the system, so a cascade can run on a program engagement or on a distributor metric.

Because a flat group has no layers, cascade calculations only have something to walk when the bound group uses one of the Pro structures. This is why the calculation picker hides the cascade options when a flat group is bound. For the details of how the picker matches calculations to structures, see Why some calculation methods disappear.

Your existing setup keeps working

Upgrading does not touch your current configuration. The tiers are cumulative, so every program, distributor, and rule you have already configured behaves exactly as it did before.

In particular, program groups are unaffected. A program group bundles related programs and decides which one fires per conversion. It is a separate concept from a collaborator group, and it lives in the lower tiers. Adding collaborator groups does not replace program groups or change how they resolve. The two systems do different jobs and run side by side.

Collaborator groups also bind eligibility in addition to your existing eligibility rules rather than overriding them. A collaborator who was already eligible for a program through direct enrollment stays eligible. Binding a group to that same program adds the group’s members as an additional eligible set. Neither path masks the other. Being eligible through both paths does not pay a collaborator twice. Eligibility decides which programs a collaborator can earn from, and the program credits them once per conversion through its own calculation. The two paths only put the collaborator in the eligible set, they do not stack credits.

So an upgrade is additive in both senses. No existing data is rewritten, and the new eligibility mechanism stacks on top of what you already have.

The path to start using groups

After upgrading to Plus, the path to managing eligibility by group is:

1. Create a collaborator group and add members to it. See Create a collaborator group for the step-by-step walkthrough.
2. Bind the group to a program or a distributor. Every member of the group becomes eligible for the bound program or distributor.
3. Manage eligibility going forward by adding and removing members rather than enrolling collaborators individually.

At the Plus tier the group’s structure is flat, which is the right choice when membership is all you need. For more on when flat is the correct structure, see Choosing a collaborator group structure.

The path to start using cascades

Cascades require the Pro tier, because they depend on the hierarchical structures Pro adds. Once you are on Pro:

1. Give the group a hierarchical structure. Switch the group from flat to linear chain or parent-child, depending on whether your members form a single ordered line or a tree.
2. Set each member’s structural position. A linear chain orders members by position, and a parent-child tree arranges them by depth. Switching a group’s structure does not migrate per-member structural metadata, so after a structure change you need to set positions or parents on the members for the new structure to read them.
3. Configure a cascade calculation on the program engagement or distributor metric. Choose upline cascade to walk toward the top of the hierarchy or downline cascade to walk toward the leaves. With a hierarchical group bound, the picker shows these options. With a flat group bound, it hides them.
4. Set the per-layer points for the cascade. See Configure cascade payouts for the full walkthrough.

For help deciding which calculation strategy fits a given program, see Choosing a calculation strategy.

Summary of what each tier adds

A short reference for what becomes available as you move up.

Tier	What it adds for collaborator groups
Lite, Essentials	Programs, distributors, program groups, and the rest of the core incentive system. No collaborator groups.
Plus	The collaborator group, the flat structure, and group-to-program and group-to-distributor bindings for eligibility.
Pro	The linear-chain and parent-child structures, the layered structure behind them, and upline and downline cascade calculations on both programs and distributors.