Challenge

Because Meetup was originally a consumer-oriented platform, payments on the platform were simple and straightforward: organisers paid a standard monthly rate. But expanding into business payments meant adding new layers of complexity, including tiered subscription billing plans, recurring payments, trial periods and variable usage charges.

Meetup appointed a full-time employee from its accounting team to manage the process end-to-end, manually calculating billing amounts for each customer, generating and sending invoices, and then importing payments data into Intacct, its accounting system, for cash reconciliation. Though this approach worked at launch, it couldn't scale as Meetup Pro grew. The enterprise product grew quickly enough that one person could no longer maintain its billing systems.

Additionally, Meetup’s manual subscription billing workflow prevented the team from experimenting with new ways to package and present premium subscription options to Meetup Pro customers. The team did not have the tools to easily test and improve the checkout experience, and getting invoices out the door took up most of their time.

Solution

Meetup chose Stripe Billing to streamline subscription billing and accounting, and to automate time-consuming tasks like calculating payment amounts and reconciling payments data across all systems.

With Stripe, Meetup has the tools and capacity to experiment with different
plans, pricing and presentation options. In one experiment, Meetup required users to enter a credit card when signing up for a trial. It had long suspected that asking for a credit card at sign up would lead to higher conversions, but PCI compliance and other constraints made it infeasible. Stripe Billing made it easy to collect credit card details and automatically track when to start billing.

Results

Stripe helped Meetup create a subscription billing and accounting
workflow that is built to scale. Stripe made it easy to connect and improve
existing payments workflows to create a single, automated system of record and helped Meetup Pro drive a 3x increase in conversions from trial to paid subscriptions within months of implementing Stripe Billing.