Challenge

Beautiful.ai’s smart slide templates automatically adapt to users’ content, making it easier and more efficient for business professionals around the world to build presentations. A few years after its launch, the company was ready to find a payment partner. They had several criteria.

First, the team wanted a partner that could handle its multitiered pricing model, which has different prices for individual users and teams. Beautiful.ai wanted detailed analytics and reporting tools to understand plan performance and revenue trends.

The company was growing internationally, so it was important that its partner both provide support as it scaled and facilitate payments worldwide. In addition to enabling international growth, the partner’s payment technology needed to be a light lift for Beautiful.ai’s developers. “We needed a system to process recurring subscription payments from our customers that could be easily implemented and managed,” said Dan Visnick, Beautiful.ai’s CMO.

The company also required a frictionless payment experience—something that was important for its self-serve users. “It’s very important for a customer to be able to add their credit card information into the system seamlessly so they can be up and running on the product right away,” said Travis Millard, VP of finance at Beautiful.ai.

Finally, Beautiful.ai wanted its payment partner to offer automated tools for dunning and revenue recovery, so the company could avoid leaving money on the table. Subscription models, which are particularly vulnerable to failed payments, typically benefit from data-driven dunning strategies tailored to their unique user base.

Solution

In 2019, Beautiful.ai opted to partner with Stripe due to its developer-friendly documentation and integrated suite of sophisticated payment and billing tools. The company also appreciated Stripe’s reputation for reliability. “You don’t want to have your billing and payments sitting on a risky startup that can go out of business,” said Millard. “Working with a trusted brand is key.”

Beautiful.ai adopted Stripe Billing to manage the recurring billing for its subscription business. The Billing API makes it easy to offer a single product, like a subscription, at different prices for individual and team plans with little or no code required.

Integrating Stripe Payments gave Beautiful.ai access to the Optimized Checkout Suite, which includes a set of embeddable UI components through Stripe Elements; access to payment methods, including digital wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay; and Link, Stripe’s accelerated checkout solution that autofills customer payment details for a fast, easy checkout experience. Smart Retries, which uses AI to identify the optimal times to retry failed payments, helps Beautiful.ai combat involuntary churn. Stripe also allows businesses to automate the process of sending emails to customers when a payment fails.

Results

Unified payment and billing tools drive efficiency with one-week integration

Unifying Stripe Payments and Billing is “integral” to Beautiful.ai’s ability to do business, according to Millard. The efficiency began with the initial implementation: Beautiful.ai started offering Stripe-powered subscriptions in just a week.

Billing provides visibility into transaction data and revenue streams

The Billing integration allows the company to monitor the health of its business every day, as well as manage different pricing plans easily. “If we were doing it manually, that would be extremely cumbersome,” said Millard. “Doing it automatically is a big help, and it also helps us downstream with our reporting on revenue concentration between different plan types.”

Stripe integration supports business growth with 6 million users across nearly 200 countries

Beautiful.ai has grown substantially over the years. Today, it has more than 6 million users in nearly 200 countries. Despite the pace of that growth, the company can manage its payment and billing functions with minimal staff. “Stripe allows us to scale without having to add headcount to support billing,” said Millard.