Stripe launches Stripe Billing to accelerate boom in subscription-based businesses

SAN FRANCISCO—Stripe today launched Stripe Billing, a new product built on top of its core payments infrastructure that simplifies the recurring billing process for SaaS and subscription-based companies.

Subscriptions are a driving force in the internet economy. Consumers are increasingly embracing subscriptions, prompting more businesses—from startups to Fortune 100s—to adopt recurring revenue models. The subscription e-commerce market has grown more than 100 percent a year over the past five years, and 32 percent of people would prefer to buy goods via subscriptions than one-off purchases.

However, subscription billing systems have traditionally been costly, complex and highly manual to operate. On average, most recurring-revenue businesses leave around 10 percent of revenue on the table for reasons related to inadequate tools for finding and collecting payments they’re owed.

With Stripe Billing, businesses of all sizes now have access to enterprise-grade tools that enable them to implement subscription models quickly and at scale. Billing uses Stripe’s advanced machine learning infrastructure to help businesses increase revenue, move more quickly and significantly reduce engineering effort, enabling companies to focus on running their business and treating the payments process as an easy-to-integrate product.

Businesses on Stripe can now use Billing to increase:

• Revenue: Businesses using Stripe’s revenue recovery tools see a 10 percent revenue increase on average, including 3 percent due to machine learning-powered smart retry logic. Bench, for example, recovered 12 percent more revenue with Stripe Billing.

• Speed: Companies can get up and running with sophisticated billing tools in a matter of days rather than months or years. For example, Eero, a connected home WiFi system, launched subscription billing in less than two weeks, with only two developers working on the project.

• Flexibility: Test and try many different pricing models, including different trial periods, metered or usage-based billing, and one-off invoices. Using Stripe Billing to test different approaches, Meetup increased their trial conversions by 300 percent.

Stripe Billing streamlines the recurring billing process and reduces declines by up to 45 percent, with features such as:

• Integrated invoicing and bank transfers: After a business assigns a customer to a particular subscription plan, Stripe handles the rest: charging customers on a set day (depending on time, metered usage, or tiered billing), generating invoices and reminders, and streamlining accounts receivable functions by automatically matching incoming payments to outgoing invoices. Stripe Billing also supports fully integrated ACH payments (bank transfers) and wires, which are especially important for B2B invoices that tend to be larger dollar amounts paid from corporate bank accounts.

• Automatic card-updater: Outdated card details can pose a deceptively big financial challenge for businesses, especially recurring revenue businesses whose customers may not take the time to update their payment methods when they receive new cards in the mail. Partnerships with Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and American Express enable Stripe to auto-update tens of millions of cards every year. As a result, companies using Stripe report 4-8 percent revenue increases from cards that would’ve otherwise expired.

• Machine-learning-powered smart payments: The smart retry logic built into Stripe Billing relies on Stripe’s advanced machine learning techniques, trained on transaction data across hundreds of thousands of businesses globally in the Stripe network and updated in real time. Sifting through hundreds of subtle signals—from static information like country of origin to dynamic data like frequency of different IP addresses—Stripe can automatically identify the best moment to retry a particular failed payment, helping businesses reduce manual work, recover more payments, and increase their revenue by 3 percent on average.

“SaaS, subscription and recurring revenue business models have become a major force for economic growth on the internet. However, for the vast majority of companies, running a billing and subscription system at any scale is both laborious and costly. Stripe’s new Billing product intends to mitigate this complexity and expense while democratizing access to enterprise-grade billing tools for companies of all sizes,” said Jordan McKee, principal analyst at 451 Research.

“We’ve reached an inflection point in the long arc of online commerce,” said Tara Seshan, product manager for Stripe Billing. “SaaS companies have been some of the internet’s greatest success stories up to now, but we’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s possible. With Stripe Billing, we’re democratizing access to enterprise-grade billing tools, allowing companies of all sizes to grow their recurring revenue more steeply. We’re excited to power the next generation of subscription companies, as we continue our mission of building the economic infrastructure to help grow the GDP of the internet.”

Starting today, Stripe Billing is available to all Stripe users in the United States and Canada. To learn more, visit stripe.com/billing.