How Freedom improved conversions by 33% with a stellar billing experience, using Chargebee

The Problem

Freedom is a popular distraction blocker used by over 2,000,000 people worldwide. But it wasn’t an easy story for them when the world started spending more time on mobile phones than desktops. With the advent of mobile phones, people were getting more distracted.

Although they had a desktop solution, they decided to launch an integrated, multi-device distraction blocking platform in 2015.

With Stripe as their payment gateway, they built a simple integration that would help them manage their subscriptions. But at their scale, it wasn't long before they ran into problems.

The Freedom team realized that Stripe wasn't built to handle all they needed to scale their business and achieve their desired trajectory. Some of their problems included:

• Offering multiple payment methods

• A self-serve subscription management option for their customers

• Having a better view of their numbers

They realized they had to build many of these features on Stripe, and it was clear that it wasn't the best use of their time.

The Solution

Freedom began an extensive search for a third-party billing solution that would work with Stripe and handle all these for them. They made a matrix of all their feature requirements to zero down one solution. They had a light integration using Chargebee's PCI compliant hosted pages.

This was followed soon by a deeper integration into the application. They had multiple thousand subscriptions, which were also ported into Chargebee without much hassle. Chargebee was able to:

• Offer multiple payment options like PayPal and Amazon, in addition to credit cards - which was necessary for a consumer-focused international business like Freedom. Wondering how Chargebee offers multiple payment options?

• Provide a self-service portal to let customers manage their subscriptions.

• Create and manage coupons effortlessly to improve Freedom’s conversions, as the ability to give out discounts wasn't easy with Stripe.

“Chargebee has easily contributed to a third of our conversions. They've truly helped us open up to the global market and drastically reduced our development cycles,” says CEO and Founder Fred Stutzman.

The Impact

Switching to Chargebee improved Freedom’s checkout quality and boosted their conversions. Apart from this, Chargebee also offered numerous metrics and data for Freedom to analyze their business operations through RevenueStory. Phil Amalong, the Head of Marketing at Freedom, loves Chargebee's metrics dashboard and the exports. "If I can't find something that I'm looking for, I just request the Chargebee team, and they're quick with the report that I need," says Phil.

A single source of truth for Freedom’s mobile & web subscriptions

Mobile subscriptions have always been an integral part of Freedom’s acquisition strategy, contributing to two-thirds of its signups. With the shift to remote work (and more people turning to Freedom to avoid distractions) accelerating their mobile app adoption, Fred’s team wanted to double down on improvements to their mobile apps and grow their presence across the app stores. But managing their mobile subscriptions outside of Chargebee posed different hurdles — lack of visibility of channel-wise revenue data, little control over subscriber communication, and hours of development and maintenance work on provisioning and verifying the billing accuracy. Adopting Chargebee’s Mobile Solutions was a one-stop solution for all these challenges.

“To track how much revenue we were getting through each of the platforms (App Store, Play Store, and Web) was particularly challenging. Now that we've implemented App Store receipt validation through Chargebee, we will simplify all of the workarounds we have in place. The prospect of having it all under one roof is great. We will be able to rely on Chargebee as a single source of truth to tell us whether a user is subscribed or not,” says Damir Zekić, Director of Engineering at Freedom.

To their marketing team, the best part about Chargebee’s Mobile Solutions is now having their Dunning sequence set up in Chargebee. “We can now control the frequency and the message that our mobile subscribers receive, which we didn't have before,” says Phil.

We didn't have another choice; we never had to choose between Chargebee and another provider. Chargebee was the clear winner. Other enterprise solutions weren't consumer-focused, and that was a strict no for us.

Fred Stutzman, CEO, Freedom