Today, we’re excited to launch Stripe Billing, a new suite of tools to help companies of all sizes automate, optimize, and scale recurring business models. This new product is an evolution of Stripe Subscriptions and adds many new features.

Increasingly, the most innovative companies are establishing recurring relationships with their customers. As these businesses iterate to find the best pricing and sales strategy, they’re often unnecessarily constrained by what their billing system allows. For some companies that already used Stripe, our Subscriptions product was limiting as well. They needed to do more than just simple subscription management. Based on feedback from many of our customers and others, we built Stripe Billing to provide fast-growing businesses the tools to move quickly and design billing around customer experience.

Stripe Billing has two components. For developers, our APIs provide composable building blocks that make it easy to design and iterate on different billing models. For business teams, we’ve built easy-to-use Dashboard tools that help manage recurring billing from end to end.

Flexible building blocks for billing

Fast-growing companies regularly experiment with billing as they grow their business and expand their offerings. Examples include Slack’s “fair billing policy”, Meetup’s new metered billing, and Postmates’ recently-launched subscriptions offering. As businesses iterate on pricing and launch new business lines, they need the ability to customize billing quickly and easily.

At the core of Stripe Billing are new APIs and Dashboard tools that help businesses intuitively design and represent even the most complex billing models—from simple seat licensing to complex multi-layered tiered metered plans. Stripe Billing also makes it easy to add or change billing models, so you can easily test and roll out different pricing. You can learn more in our docs.

“Expanding into offerings for businesses not only demanded new product features and capabilities but also foundational changes to Meetup’s billing infrastructure. Stripe’s open API and simple, user-friendly interface made it easy for the entire team.”

— Sylvan Boucard, Product Manager at Meetup

Faster payments with Stripe-hosted invoices

Stripe Billing also includes a new way for U.S. businesses to invoice customers. Starting today, Stripe can email your customers an invoice that perfectly matches your company’s branding and will securely collect payments. You can try out our demo or create an invoice from your Dashboard.

In addition to credit and debit card payments, invoices also support ACH and wire transfers in the U.S. This should be especially helpful to businesses that have automated billing for self-serve accounts, but still rely on accounts-receivable processes to handle larger invoices. Behind the scenes, Stripe now generates a unique virtual bank account number for each of your customers, which keeps your company’s banking details private. Any payments received appear in your Stripe balance and invoices are automatically reconciled and marked as closed.

“For large invoice amounts, our customers expect to pay via invoice, rather than credit card. As a fast-growing business, handling invoicing manually quickly became a huge pain. With Stripe, we automate all aspects of invoicing and accepting ACH and wire payments which means we can scale our business faster.”

— Eric Koslow, Co-founder, Lattice

Smart revenue recovery

Nearly a quarter of churn is caused by missed payments or declined cards. Stripe Billing now includes our automated card updater, which saves your customers from having to do data entry if their card is reissued by automatically syncing new payment details (such as updated expiry dates) from our financial partners.

We're also introducing a new feature: smart retry logic. It’s powered by the same machine learning infrastructure behind Stripe Radar. Our algorithms train on data across the billions of payments in the Stripe network to predict the right way to retry failed payments. With smart retry logic, we can reduce involuntary churn, maximize payment acceptance, and decrease toil for your users and customer support teams.

In 2017, Stripe’s recovery tools reduced payment declines up to 45% on average and increased revenue 10% on average.

Bench recovered 12% of revenue through card account updater in 2017.

We’ve made getting started with Stripe Billing as easy as possible. You can start sending invoices today right from the Dashboard. Since Stripe Billing’s APIs are modular, you can choose to build a new metered billing system or run a lightweight pricing experiment for your next product or feature launch. (Flexible billing and smart recovery tools are available globally today. Invoices are available in the U.S. and coming soon to many more countries.)

If you’re using Stripe Subscriptions today, check out our guide to getting started. We hope Stripe Billing helps your business. Let us know if you have any feedback or questions—we’re just getting started and we’d love to hear from you.

Build your recurring business model with Stripe Billing. Learn More