Challenge

Singapore-based Vibefam launched in 2021 to provide an all-in-one platform for yoga and Pilates studios and martial arts gyms while delivering exceptional customer service and rapid onboarding.

Working quickly, the team built its own subscription billing system to collect fees from customers, then implemented Stripe Payments to process users’ payments. “Speed of activation was our top criteria,” said Serene Lim, cofounder and CEO at Vibefam. “The engineers went ahead with Stripe because it was the easiest option for us to implement right from the start.”

After two years of rapid growth, Vibefam’s founders were looking for opportunities to add revenue as the company prepared to scale beyond Singapore to the rest of Asia. In addition to collecting subscription revenue from gyms and fitness studios, the platform aimed to monetize payments.

At the same time, Vibefam’s homegrown billing system was straining under the growth. Its sales team regularly tailored solutions for different use cases and needed a more flexible approach for subscription billing. The internal system also failed to provide a clear view of revenue at either the company-wide level or at the individual account or regional level.

To scale successfully, Vibefam needed payment and billing infrastructure that offered more flexibility, required less manual oversight, and offered robust reporting capabilities.

Solution

In 2023, Vibefam reached out to Stripe to discuss expansion plans and discovered additional opportunities through Stripe Connect.

“We knew that we wanted to monetize our transactions, and Connect was the first step for us to get there,” said Lim.

Vibefam integrated Connect to build an embedded payments business, allowing its customers to collect online payment for memberships and class fees. The company opted to use Stripe-hosted onboarding, which means Stripe handles identity verification and compliance with multilingual UI—a key feature considering Vibefam’s expansion plans.
“Given that we were prioritizing speed to market, this was the quickest way we could get the payment gateway live on our product,” said Lim. “The UI/UX on the Stripe-hosted onboarding was clean, professional, and aligned with the interface that we wanted to present to our customers.”

To maximize revenue, Vibefam wanted to make it as easy as possible for gymgoers to check out. It integrated the Optimized Checkout Suite, a unified solution designed to enhance the checkout experience and increase conversion. Vibefam implemented Stripe Checkout, a prebuilt, customizable payment form that provides a secure and optimized checkout experience. The suite’s AI models dynamically surface the most relevant payment methods and present them in an order optimized for each transaction. To further streamline the checkout process, Vibefam enabled Link, a wallet built by Stripe that securely saves and autofills customers’ payment details for a quicker transaction experience.

Vibefam initially outsourced fee collection to Stripe, then gained the confidence to set its own processing fees within a year. The team initially struggled with managing payment costs, but worked with Stripe professional services to better understand how to optimize margins and make decisions around rates. The Stripe professional services team also guided Vibefam through an upgrade to its Connect integration that enabled the company to set different processing fees for customers subscribing to different pricing tiers.

After more experience with Stripe’s product suite, Vibefam decided to switch from its internal billing system to Stripe Billing, which automates subscription management workflows. The system allowed the Vibefam team to manage the company’s complicated contracts without time-consuming manual oversight. As a result, they could spend less time managing customer billing details while gaining a clearer view of business performance through the reporting available in the Stripe Dashboard.

Most recently, the company launched VibePay, an in-person payment solution built on Stripe Terminal and Tap to Pay on Android, which allows gyms to accept contactless payments from physical cards and digital wallets with no extra hardware required.

Results

Vibefam adds new revenue stream that grows to 10% of its business in 2 years

Early on, subscription fees were Vibefam’s sole source of revenue. With Connect, the company reinvented its business model, creating an embedded payments business and driving an entirely new revenue stream. In the first year on Connect, Vibefam’s payment volume averaged $1 million per month—a figure that doubled to $2 million per month just a year later.

“Payments had never been a big piece of our revenue projections prior to our discussions with Stripe,” said Lim. “Now we’re looking at embedded finance as a key revenue driver for the next two to three years. It’s currently 10% of our revenue, but we are targeting 30% to 40% going forward.”

Link grows to represent 30% of payment volume

After Vibefam integrated the Optimized Checkout Suite and enabled Link, the wallet grew to account for nearly a third of its payment volume. The frictionless checkout experience allows returning gymgoers to complete purchases quickly.

Adopting a new pricing model for payment processing takes just two weeks

The team at Vibefam anticipated it would take four months to implement custom transaction pricing. Instead, it took just two weeks.

“The switch happened really quickly, and the engineering effort was a lot lower than we had originally planned and expected,” said Lim. “The process was quite seamless.”

Vibefam migrated more than 350 accounts to Billing within 4 weeks

Three Vibefam engineers took only two weeks to integrate Billing, while the sales team needed two weeks to clean up data in preparation for the migration. In total, Vibefam successfully migrated more than 350 accounts to Billing in less than a month.

The team has already begun experimenting with usage-based billing for new features. “We switched our referral campaign feature to usage-based billing—offering it free to try, then taking a cut only when studios successfully convert new customers,” said Lim. “In the past, we would have just charged for the feature up front.”

Going forward, the company is considering moving to usage-based billing. While its home-grown billing infrastructure wouldn’t have accommodated that approach, Billing can easily support it.

Billing saves Vibefam one day per month in reconciliation time and increases confidence in the data

The new system saves at least one day per month in reconciliation time, according to Lim. More importantly, she now has full confidence in Vibefam’s subscription data, which includes average revenue per customer and churn rates.

“In the past I didn’t have access to these numbers, so I just had to make guesstimates,” said Lim. “Now it’s all very clear on the Stripe Dashboard.”