Study.com scaled painlessly to millions of users and 5 products with Chargebee

Challenge

In 2014, Study.com began to monetize its courses and transition to a subscription-based model. They started by building a paywall with a single payment gateway. As they grew, they realized their development & accounting teams were losing time on relatively low-value but frequent manual interventions to support the growing subscriber base.

Simple tasks like changing price plans or creating coupon codes were a lot of work. They needed a system that would eliminate headaches by letting them do all of the changes and still give them the flexibility to manage their subscriptions.

Particularly, they were looking for a solution that helped them with three objectives:

• Automate invoicing as they expanded their course catalog & added more product lines with complex billing use cases.

• Provide multiple payment options to reduce the risk of single-point failure & enhance the checkout experience for a diverse set of international users.

• Make decisions based on valuable business insights from their subscription metrics.

Solution

Study.com knew they needed a solution to support scale as they captured the e-learning market and expanded their course catalog & their offering. After evaluating many different solutions, Study.com zeroed in on Chargebee to manage their subscriptions because they felt confident in Chargebee’s ability to keep up with their growth trajectory. 

Today, Chargebee is enabling Study.com to serve millions of users:

• The scalable product catalog with automation across checkout-to-recognition handles the billing complexity of millions of users across multiple products and geographies.

• Integration with multiple payment gateways provides diverse payment options to Study.com’s users and reduces dependency on a single processor, thus eliminating the risk of payment failure.

• RevenueStory, Chargebee’s Subscription Analytics platform, helps the leadership make data-driven decisions through real-time subscription insights across a user’s lifecycle.

Results

Since they first began using Chargebee, Study.com experienced exponential growth in the number of educators and learners on their platform. Their decision to shift to a subscription management platform paid off in spades as they quickly scaled their offerings across 5 products while Chargebee took care of the complexities of growth.

• Providing a seamless checkout experience with 4 payment gateways: Chargebee’s migration team helped Study.com set up a new payment processor in less than 2 days preventing service disruption on their platform. Now, Study.com offers 4 payment gateways eliminating the risk of payment failure and allowing international users to checkout comfortably with the payment method of their choice.

“Chargebee was able to ‘sit on top’ of our existing payment processor with no complications. It provided us the ability to offer multiple payment options, which helped us acquire a more diverse set of customers using our solution.”

Voitek Sobieszczanski, VP of Finance, Study.com

• Growing course catalog to 85,000+ lessons with unwavering focus: Study.com found immediate scalability with Chargebee, allowing them to focus all their resources on what they're best at - diversifying their course material. They’ve grown their course catalog from a single product to 85,000+ lessons & more than 18,000 learning tools since adopting Chargebee.

• Delivering 25 million hours of education in 2020: In 2020, there was a significant shift towards distance learning. With schools closing down overnight, both learners & educational institutions turned to e-learning solutions to minimize the disruption. Study.com experienced increased individual learners and educational institutions wanting to leverage the platform to continue teaching students virtually.

Chargebee is helping the Study.com team live up to their two core values of ‘Simplify’ and ‘Embracing Data’ – while realizing their vision of making education accessible to everyone.