How Chargebee fueled Slidebean’s global expansion to 30+ countries

The Problem

Slidebean had built their entire product on top of the Stripe ecosystem, including their billing operations. But as Slidebean started to expand to new geographies such as Europe, they had to offer a wider array of payment options preferred by European customers.  With every passing day, Slidebean realized that they were leaving money on the table with their current revenue tech-stack. Stripe Billing simply could not keep pace with their fast-changing payment needs.

The Slidebean engineering team tried to work around Stripe’s limitations and decided to build an in-house integration with PayPal. “In some European countries, our users preferred PayPal. We were leaving money on the table simply because we were not offering these payment methods”, Jose Enrique, Co-founder and CTO of Slidebean tells us. Jose’s team soon realized that building the integration even for just one additional payment method like PayPal was a huge drain on their time and resources.

With a duct-taped solution built around the limitations of Stripe Billing, Slidebean ended up with:

• a suboptimal payments workflow,

• duplicate subscription records, and

• multiple sources of truth for billing data

Everybody needs a secure checkout system, but that's not something we need to devote our energy to because it's much better solved by Chargebee. So we decided to focus on what we do best. And that's how we usually tackle anything: Should we do this on our own? Or should we use somebody who’s solved every use case possible? And in this case, it made a lot more sense to use an expert like Chargebee.

Jose Enrique, Co-founder and CTO, Slidebean

The Solution

The team zeroed in on Chargebee so they could support both one-time and recurring payments. This would allow them to future-proof their payments, recurring billing, and subscription management needs. And Chargebee’s white-glove migration & onboarding assistance was the icing on the cake.

With Chargebee’s support for over 25 payment gateways and multiple payment methods, Slidebean is equipped with the payments infrastructure to scale into new geographies like Europe. Now that Slidebean can accept both one-time and recurring payments, they’re able to support customers in over 30 countries regardless of their payment preferences.

Slidebean has automated its entire checkout workflow through Chargebee. Since Chargebee’s checkout has out-of-the-box support for PCI-DSS, EU-GDPR, and other security and compliance requirements, Slidebean’s developers can focus solely on building the product.

The Payoff

Maximizing revenue with additional payment options By switching to Chargebee and leveraging its plug-and-play integrations with major gateways and payment methods, Slidebean avoided getting locked into the Stripe ecosystem. A smoother PayPal integration has led to an increase in checkout conversions, which now brings in additional revenue of $180,000 every year without having to change a single line of code. This was revenue that Slidebean was leaving on the table when they were restricted to credit cards.

Nurturing customers throughout the subscription lifecycle With Chargebee, Slidebean is equipped to sign up users for a freemium plan, nudge trial users to upgrade to the paid plan, and allow customers to upgrade or downgrade via a self-serve portal. When a customer signs up, their subscription information is synced with the customer account on Hubspot thanks to the Chargebee-Hubspot integration. The subscription context empowers the customer support team to offer faster and better billing-related support.