Challenge

Based in Berlin, sofatutor is a leading online education platform providing learning tools for K–12 students, such as tutorial videos, learning games, and interactive exercises. Since its launch in 2009, the platform has offered its learning tools through a B2C subscription model, which it supported with a subscription management system that it developed and maintained in-house.

After nearly 15 years, sofatutor had produced a library of more than 9,000 videos and 44,000 educational exercises, serving 1.6 million students across Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the UK, and the US. In the process, sofatutor outgrew its original in-house billing system. Adding new payment methods was time-consuming, making it difficult to respond quickly to changing consumer preferences. It was also difficult to test alternative subscription models. Increasingly, the sofatutor team found that maintaining and iterating on the legacy system required significant internal resources that detracted from core product innovation.

“We would have to build every new idea, every new feature, in-house when it’s obviously not our core topic to build very flexible, full-on subscription management,” said Colin Schlüter, managing director and co-chief executive officer of sofatutor.

sofatutor wanted to launch a completely new product geared toward early learning: sofatutor KIDS, designed for children ages two to six. To support this launch, the company began looking for a new billing solution that could accommodate multiple product offerings, varied pricing tiers, a variety of payment methods, and global expansion. In its search for a new payment solution, sofatutor also sought to reduce fraud with a more robust fraud detection system.

Solution

For the launch of its new early learning product, sofatutor conducted a thorough evaluation of subscription management solutions. Ultimately, the company chose to expand its relationship with Stripe, which it was already using for payment processing.

With Stripe Billing, sofatutor gained a flexible, simple-to-use subscription management solution that could help increase conversion with more than 40 local payment methods, and help it navigate global expansion with support for more than 130 currencies. sofatutor could use Billing’s no-code features to quickly go to market with new subscription offerings and multiproduct plans, and it could easily test and adapt its subscription models. The Stripe solution also enabled sofatutor to keep pace with market demands; quickly roll out flexible pricing models; and support coupons, free trials, prorations, and more.

To drive conversion and improve its customer experience, sofatutor enabled several payment methods through its Stripe integration, such as PayPal (which is particularly popular in Germany), Apple Pay, Amazon Pay, and SEPA Direct Debit (which many European customers prefer for recurring payments).

The ease of integrating Billing’s easy-to-use features with sofatutor’s existing tech stack also ensured that sofatutor tech teams could focus their efforts on the platform’s core product rather than building and maintaining their subscription billing infrastructure.

Results

sofatutor integrates Billing within two weeks, migrates tens of thousands of accounts without incident

sofatutor implemented Billing within two weeks for a quick launch of its new early learning tool. After a smooth implementation process, sofatutor began a phased migration for its main platform and is gradually rolling out Billing over the course of a year. So far, sofatutor has migrated tens of thousands of accounts with zero negative customer impact.

Stripe Billing’s no-code tools help reduce sofatutor’s internal workload

With Billing’s easy-to-use, flexible features, sofatutor is looking forward to reducing the internal resources needed to maintain a subscription management system.

“With Stripe Billing, we now see a very different pace of development in terms of new features, new options, and possibilities to test new things in the subscription space that we want to use,” said Schlüter.

Increase in conversion rate after the implementation of Stripe checkout process

Even after years of in-house optimization, the implementation of a new checkout process in conjunction with Billing resulted in a 2.7% increase in conversion rate.