Challenge

Kittl was launched in 2022 by a small team that shared an ambitious vision: building a powerful online graphic design platform that offered tools for creatives at all skill levels. The business plan called for a subscription-based model, but given the broad range of user needs, Kittl expected its subscription tiers and pricing models would likely evolve over time.

To get off the ground quickly, Kittl needed a billing and payments partner that offered easy-to-implement technology that wouldn’t overburden its development teams at launch—but that was sophisticated enough to scale with the company’s growth.

“Kittl had a global footprint from the beginning, so we needed an international provider for international payments,” said Alexandre Willot, senior product manager at Kittl. “We also needed tools that could be modified over time to meet the changing needs of our business.”

To make the signup and payment process easy for a global user base, Kittl wanted to offer a range of different payment methods that appealed to different local preferences. But serving that global customer base also made Kittl concerned about other potential challenges, such as optimizing payment authorization rates and managing potential fraud. In addition, the company wanted a solution to simplify tax collection and accounting in multiple countries, so their developers and finance professionals could focus on expanding the business.

Lastly, Kittl’s leadership team acknowledged that being able to recognize and respond to billing and payment trends would be an essential driver of smart decision-making as the business grew. So any payment and billing partner also needed to offer accurate and granular data that was easy to access and analyze.

Solution

Kittl chose Stripe for its billing and payments needs, seeing that Stripe technology could support the company’s business model no matter where it expanded to and how complex its subscription logic might become. “We want to work with best-in-class partners, and we want to be known as a best-in-class platform as well,” said Bryan Lee, Kittl’s head of marketing. “For us, Stripe was an easy choice.”

Stripe Billing offered easy integration and set up that in just one month allowed Kittl to launch with a basic set of monthly subscription tiers—including a free option—but with different pricing for those tiers depending on the subscriber’s country. Billing’s flexibility also allowed Kittl to update its pricing model to evolve with changing needs: one year after launch, the company added usage-based credits for each paid subscription tier to give subscribers access to new AI-powered tools, including image and background generators.

Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite was also a good fit for a growing company with potentially hundreds of thousands of global users. The Optimized Checkout Suite includes Stripe Elements, a set of UI building blocks for designing a custom payments experience. The Optimized Checkout Suite also has enabled Kittl to receive payments in 10 different currencies and accept 5 payment methods, including Apple Pay, PayPal, and Link, Stripe’s accelerated checkout solution. To improve authorization rates, Kittl adopted Stripe’s card account updater, which automatically updates card details for customer cards that have expired or been replaced; network tokens, which replace a card’s primary account number with a unique, secure identifier to improve payment processing; and Adaptive Acceptance, which uses AI to identify and retry false declines in real time.

To further improve transaction success rate, Kittl implemented Stripe Radar for Fraud Teams. Radar employs AI trained on millions of global transactions to better detect fraud in real time. Radar for Fraud Teams allows customers to build on that foundation with customized rules based on hundreds of attributes, including IP address, card details, behavioral signals, and metadata, as well as advanced insights to understand their fraud trends. In particular, Kittl hoped Radar could help address a frequent source of declined transactions: prepaid cards. Kittl noticed this issue often came into play with free trials, when customers would sign up with a card that couldn’t be charged on a recurring basis.

For global tax management, Kittl implemented Stripe Tax, which helps companies calculate, collect, and report tax on transactions from around the world with a single integration. And with its Stripe implementation, Kittl gained access to the Stripe Dashboard, which aggregates data related to revenue, usage, subscribers, trials, churn, and collections, making it easy to run analytics that drive business decisions.

Results

Only three developers needed to manage billing and payments

Stripe’s developer-friendly APIs help Kittl maintain a lean development team, with only three developers in charge of the company’s billing and payment systems. The ease of adding new payment methods through the Optimized Checkout Suite has enabled Kittl to test acceptance of certain cards and digital wallets, such as iDEAL in the Netherlands, to better accommodate customer preferences.

2.12% increase in payment success rate thanks to authorization optimizations

Stripe authorization optimizations, such as card account updater, have driven significant improvements in payment authorizations. These features boosted Kittl’s payment success rate by 2.12% over a 12-month period. In addition, in January 2025, Kittl began using a US-based Stripe account to accept domestic payments, which helped improve transaction authorization rates for new US customers by more than 50%.

Radar for Fraud Teams reduces delinquent churn

Detailed data on failed or blocked transactions has helped Kittl further improve its payment success rate. Using Radar for Fraud Teams allowed Kittl’s developers to create a custom rule to block any tentative payments placed with prepaid cards, reducing delinquent churn.

Stripe data and analytics enable greater confidence in decision-making

Kittl’s decision-makers at all levels appreciate the insights they’re able to derive from the company’s Stripe Dashboard, which combines data from all the Stripe apps the company uses in powerful ways. Decisions like which markets to focus on, which payment methods to offer, and how much to charge for services and subscription tiers are aided by analytics comparing data points across markets, such as usage of different payment methods by market.

“Having a frontend dashboard really helps, as we have a small team of backend engineers focused on our financial operations,” said Willot. “The dashboard gives me insights that would take a lot of time to build if we were trying to get to that point from just an API.”