Subscriptions that don't leak revenue.
Full subscription app — plan management, upgrades, downgrades, dunning, self-serve customer portal. On Stripe, delivered on monthly subscription.
Who this is for
Operator launching a subscription offering (box, membership, SaaS, service retainer) where Stripe alone doesn't model plans, upsells, or dunning for the specific business.
The pain today
- Stripe dashboard fine for basic subs, can't model your actual plans
- No customer portal — support handles every plan change manually
- Failed-payment recovery leaving 15%+ of churned MRR unrecovered
- Upsells and add-ons managed in spreadsheets, not in the billing UI
- Accounting reconciliation painful because data lives across tools
The outcome you get
- Plan management — create, edit, grandfather plans without code changes
- Self-serve customer portal with upgrade, downgrade, add-ons
- Dunning that recovers 40–60% of failed payments vs baseline
- Revenue reporting (MRR, churn, ARR, cohort analysis) from day one
- Accounting-friendly exports (Stripe + custom lines) for NetSuite or Xero
Subscription model patterns
Most subscription businesses fit one of five patterns. Flat: one plan, one price. Tiered: Starter/Pro/Enterprise with feature differences. Per-seat: billed by active user count. Usage-based: metered and invoiced at period end. Hybrid: base + usage overages. Subscription boxes and memberships usually go flat or tiered. SaaS goes tiered or per-seat. Usage-based fits API or infrastructure products. I pick the model with you based on how buyers decide — the pricing model should make the 'yes' easier, not harder. Then I wire Stripe to match: Products and Prices, subscription lifecycle, proration rules.
Failed-payment recovery
Failed payments are often 5–10% of monthly charges — half of them are recoverable with the right dunning. Stripe Smart Retries + custom dunning email sequence + in-app notifications + optional human outreach for high-value customers. Typical recovery rate: 40–60% of failed payments end up paid vs 10–20% with naive retry-and-email. The dunning work is boring — 3 retry attempts timed intelligently, branded email templates at each stage, optional SMS for mobile-first customers, grace period before subscription suspension — but it's where a significant percentage of MRR lives. For a $100k/mo subscription business, the difference between 20% recovery and 50% recovery is $30k/year.
Self-serve customer portal
A portal customers can use without emailing support. Upgrade and downgrade plan (with proration preview), add or remove seats, change payment method, update billing email, download invoices, pause subscription (configurable grace period), cancel (with optional retention flow offering discount or pause). Stripe's hosted Customer Portal covers 80% out of the box. Custom UI layered on Stripe APIs covers the remaining 20% — branded cancellation flow with retention offers, usage display, credit balance, multi-invoice selection. Most teams start with hosted and upgrade to custom when cancellation flow data shows retention offers are a measurable lever.
Case study: bolttech unified billing
bolttech's billing infrastructure handled 40+ payment providers across 15+ markets with 99.9% platform uptime. Subscription-style billing for B2B partners plus consumer transactional flows in one unified system. The disciplines that make unicorn-scale billing work — event idempotency, double-entry ledger, reconciliation automation — apply identically to a $10k-MRR subscription box or a $100k-MRR SaaS. Scale changes the dollars; engineering discipline is constant. I apply the same playbook regardless of stage because the failure modes are identical — just with smaller headlines at smaller stages.
Pricing
Subscription billing apps fit the Applications Standard tier at $3,499/mo. Complex billing (multi-entity, enterprise invoicing, marketplace payouts) moves to Pro at $4,500/mo. First-version timeline: 4–5 weeks. Subscription continues through dunning tuning, tier expansions, and portal refinement — most teams stay engaged for 6–12 months as pricing evolves with product-market fit. 14-day money-back, cancel anytime, Work Made for Hire. Stripe fees and Stripe Tax fees are Stripe's; app infrastructure runs on your chosen hosting.
Accounting integrations
Subscription data has to reach accounting. Two patterns. Stripe → accounting direct (QuickBooks, Xero integrations Stripe offers natively): clean for simple cases, loses custom line items from the app. App → accounting via custom integration: full fidelity, more work, right for complex revenue recognition. For SaaS with deferred revenue, I often integrate with dedicated RevRec tools (Stripe Revenue Recognition, or Chargebee/Maxio for more complex cases) rather than trying to solve RevRec in the custom app. The line: the app runs operations and customer-facing UI; specialized tools run the accounting specifics.
Recent proof
A comparable engagement, delivered and documented.
Unified payment orchestration across Asia and Europe
Delivered the payment orchestration platform at bolttech, a $1B+ unicorn, with 40+ integrations across multiple regions.
Frequently asked questions
The questions prospects ask before they book.
- How do I migrate existing subscribers from another billing system?
- Stripe has migration tools for major competitors (Recurly, Chargebee, Stax Bill). Preserve subscription start dates, import payment method tokens, run reconciliation before go-live. Typical migration adds 2–3 weeks to the overall project.
- What MRR reporting do I get?
- Standard dashboard: MRR, New MRR, Expansion MRR, Contraction MRR, Churn MRR, ARR, churn rate, LTV, CAC payback (if you track CAC). Cohort analysis by signup month. Exports to CSV for deeper analysis. For investor-facing reporting, I can integrate with ProfitWell or ChartMogul.
- How is dunning configurable?
- Retry schedule (days between attempts), email content per attempt, SMS optional, grace period before suspension, grace period before cancellation, retention offer (discount or pause) at specific stages. Configurable per plan tier — enterprise customers get different handling than SMB.
- Can customers pause subscriptions?
- Yes — configurable per plan (some businesses allow pause, some don't). Pause duration configurable (e.g., maximum 2 months). Pause state shown in customer portal and billing dashboard. Stripe handles the actual period-extension logic; the app surfaces the option.
- What about gift subscriptions or referral credits?
- Gift subscriptions: prepaid Stripe Subscription with specific start date, recipient receives activation email. Referral credits: Stripe's Coupon or custom credit-balance system depending on complexity. Both supported with appropriate UX. More complex reward programs (tiered loyalty) warrant a separate scoping conversation.
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