Custom subscription billing app — plan management, upgrades, downgrades, dunning, self-serve customer portal. On Stripe, delivered on monthly subscription.
- Scope
- Ship
- Iterate
monthly subscription
Who this is for
You're launching a subscription offering — a box service, SaaS product, membership, or service retainer — and Stripe alone isn't modeling your actual plans, upsells, or failed-payment recovery. You need a subscription billing application built around how your business actually prices, not around what a dashboard wizard supports.
The pain today
- Stripe dashboard fine for basic subs, can't model your actual plans or add-ons
- No customer portal — support handles every plan change manually
- Failed payments leaving 5–10% of MRR unrecovered each month
- Upsells, seat counts, and usage overages tracked in spreadsheets, not the billing UI
- Revenue recognition and accounting reconciliation painful because data lives across tools
The outcome you get
- Plan management — create, edit, grandfather plans without touching code
- Self-serve customer portal: upgrade, downgrade, add-ons, pause, cancel with retention flow
- Dunning that recovers 40–60% of failed payments vs a baseline 10–20%
- MRR, ARR, churn, and cohort reporting built in from day one
- Accounting-friendly exports for NetSuite, Xero, or QuickBooks — no manual reconciliation
Subscription model patterns
Most subscription billing applications are built around one of five pricing patterns. Flat: one plan, one price, everyone pays the same. Tiered: Starter/Pro/Enterprise with feature or usage differences at each level. Per-seat: billed by active user count, prorated when seats change mid-cycle. Usage-based: metered usage aggregated and invoiced at period end. Hybrid: a base subscription plus usage overages.
I pick the model with you based on how your buyers actually decide — the right pricing model makes the yes easier, not harder. Subscription boxes and memberships usually go flat or tiered. SaaS products go tiered or per-seat. Infrastructure and API products are almost always usage-based or hybrid. Once the model is clear, I wire Stripe to match it: Products and Prices, subscription lifecycle events, proration rules, and any metered billing meters.
Plan management — create, edit, grandfather plans without touching code
Failed-payment recovery and dunning
Failed payments are typically 5–10% of monthly charges, and roughly half are recoverable if you handle them intelligently. Stripe Smart Retries alone recovers a portion — but a custom dunning sequence on top of that recovers significantly more. The full approach: Smart Retries with intelligent timing, a branded email sequence with a direct one-click payment update link, in-app notifications inside the customer portal, optional SMS for mobile-first customers, and manual outreach triggers for high-value accounts.
Typical recovery rate with this setup: 40–60% of failed payments end up paid, versus 10–20% with naive retry-and-email. The math is straightforward. On a $100k/mo subscription business, the difference between 20% recovery and 50% is roughly $30k/year in revenue that would otherwise disappear silently.
I build the dunning configuration as a first-class feature — retry schedule, email content per attempt, grace period before suspension, grace period before cancellation, configurable per plan tier. Enterprise customers get different treatment than SMB. The whole thing is adjustable after launch without a code deploy.
40+: Payment providers integrated.
Self-serve customer portal
A portal your customers can use without emailing support. Upgrade or downgrade plan with a proration preview, add or remove seats, change payment method, update billing email, download invoices, pause subscription (with a configurable grace period), or cancel — with an optional retention flow that offers a discount or a pause before confirming the cancellation.
Stripe's hosted Customer Portal covers roughly 80% of use cases out of the box. I layer a custom UI on top of Stripe APIs for the remaining 20%: branded cancellation flow with real retention offers, usage display for metered plans, credit balance visibility, and multi-invoice selection for annual customers. Most products start with the hosted portal and migrate to the custom version once cancellation-flow data shows retention offers are converting — that's when the custom UI investment pays back clearly.
Usage-based and metered billing
If your product charges by API calls, seats added mid-month, storage consumed, or any other variable unit, usage-based billing has its own engineering requirements separate from simple recurring plans.
Stripe Billing Meters aggregate usage events from your app and translate them into invoiced amounts at period end. I wire the metering layer so your app reports usage events reliably — idempotent writes to avoid double-counting, event replay for infrastructure failures, and usage dashboards so customers see their current consumption before the invoice lands. That last part matters more than most founders expect: surprise invoices are a meaningful churn driver on usage-based plans. I've worked on billing systems at the scale of bolttech's platform, which handled 40+ payment providers across 15+ markets — the engineering discipline for idempotency and event reliability applies identically whether you're doing $10k/mo in API billing or much larger volumes.
Revenue recognition and accounting
Subscription revenue is deferred revenue. You collect cash in January for a subscription that covers January through December, and only one-twelfth of it belongs to January's P&L under ASC 606 / IFRS 15. Most early-stage founders defer this problem until an audit or a fundraise surfaces it, at which point it's expensive to untangle.
I handle two patterns. The straightforward case uses Stripe Revenue Recognition directly — it tracks subscription changes, upgrades, and prorations automatically and exports to your accounting system with correct period attribution. The complex case — multi-entity, non-standard contract terms, or professional services bundled with subscriptions — warrants a dedicated RevRec tool like Maxio or Chargebee alongside the billing app. My view: the billing app runs operations and customer-facing UI; specialized tools handle accounting specifics. Mixing the two into a custom RevRec engine is a maintenance burden nobody wants.
For day-to-day accounting, I build exports that match your ledger: Stripe charges plus any custom line items from the app, in formats that NetSuite, Xero, and QuickBooks can ingest without a cleanup step.
What bolttech's billing scale taught me
At bolttech — a $1B+ unicorn in fintech — I worked on payment infrastructure that handled 40+ payment providers across 15+ markets with 99.9% platform uptime. Subscription-style billing for B2B partners ran alongside consumer transactional flows in one unified system.
The engineering disciplines that make that scale reliable — event idempotency, double-entry ledger logic, reconciliation automation — are not unique to large companies. They apply just as directly to a $10k/mo subscription box or a $50k/mo SaaS. Scale changes the dollar amounts and the SLA pressure; the failure modes are structurally identical. I apply the same pattern regardless of stage, because cutting corners on idempotency at $10k/mo creates the same class of bugs it would at $10M/mo — just with quieter consequences.
Pricing and timeline
Subscription billing applications fit the Applications Standard tier at $4,999/mo. Complex configurations — multi-entity billing, enterprise invoicing with custom line items, marketplace payout splits — move to Pro at $5,499/mo.
First-version timeline: 4–5 weeks. The subscription continues after launch through dunning tuning, plan tier expansions, and portal refinements as pricing evolves with product-market fit. Most teams stay engaged for 6–12 months. 14-day money-back guarantee, cancel anytime, Work Made for Hire. Stripe fees and Stripe Tax fees are Stripe's; app infrastructure runs on your chosen hosting.
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.
Read the case studyFrequently asked questions
The questions prospects ask before they book.
Stripe has migration tooling for major competitors including Recurly, Chargebee, and Stax Bill. The process preserves subscription start dates, imports tokenized payment methods, and runs a reconciliation pass before go-live. I build the migration as a discrete phase with a dry-run mode so you can validate subscriber counts and MRR figures before cutting over. Typical migration adds 2–3 weeks to the overall project timeline.
Standard dashboard covers MRR, New MRR, Expansion MRR, Contraction MRR, Churn MRR, ARR, churn rate, LTV, and CAC payback if you track acquisition cost. Cohort analysis by signup month is included. Everything exports to CSV for deeper work. For investor-facing reporting, I can integrate with ProfitWell or ChartMogul — both connect cleanly to the Stripe data the app produces.
Fully configurable post-launch without code changes: retry schedule in days between attempts, email content per stage, optional SMS, grace period before suspension, grace period before cancellation, and a retention offer — discount or pause — at specific stages. Configuration is per plan tier, so enterprise customers get different handling than SMB. Adjustments take effect on the next billing cycle without a deployment.
Yes, configurable per plan — some business models allow it, others shouldn't. Pause duration is also configurable, for example a maximum of two months. Pause state is visible in both the customer portal and the billing dashboard. Stripe handles the period-extension logic on the subscription itself; the app surfaces the option, enforces plan-level rules, and records the pause reason for churn analysis.
For straightforward subscription businesses, I integrate Stripe Revenue Recognition, which tracks subscription changes and prorations and exports attribution data your accountant can use directly. More complex cases — bundled professional services, multi-element arrangements, non-standard contract terms — warrant a dedicated RevRec tool like Maxio or Chargebee. I scope which approach fits before starting, so you're not retrofitting this after a fundraise or audit.
Stripe Billing Meters receive usage events from your app via API. I build the event-reporting layer with idempotency keys so double-counting is structurally impossible, and with an event-replay queue for infrastructure failures. Customers see their running usage total in the portal before the invoice generates — that visibility alone reduces billing-surprise churn, which is a real pattern on metered plans.
Gift subscriptions use a prepaid Stripe Subscription with a specific activation date; recipients get an activation email with a one-click claim link. Referral credits use either Stripe Coupons or a custom credit-balance system depending on complexity and how the credits interact with proration. Both are supported with appropriate UX. Tiered loyalty programs with point balances warrant a separate scoping conversation — they're a different data model.