Challenge

What Atmoph aims to achieve is to bring adventure into everyday life through its 27-inch display, the Atmoph Window. More than just scenery, the device can display clocks, calendars and more – functioning as an interface that bridges the living space with the digital world. The content is offered through Atmoph's Limitless Plan, with new landscapes added daily. Atmoph is continually evolving to deliver an even richer user experience, improving display performance and exploring collaborations with films and games.

Founded in 2014, Atmoph remains a startup with just 20 employees. The company handles everything from hardware design, manufacturing and sales to software development, network services and landscape content creation. Among all these responsibilities, implementing a payment system presented a major challenge. While payments are central to the business, they require careful consideration of security and scalability factors.

"It's quite a high hurdle to build everything from the ground up ourselves. That said, we cannot compromise when it comes to the safety of billing and payment systems," said Kyohei Nakano, co-founder, director and software engineer at Atmoph Inc.

Users also requested instalment payment options for the main product, but implementing this feature would be complex and could negatively impact cash flow. After much deliberation, Stripe was chosen as the payments platform. In addition to Stripe's global track record, the deciding factors were its low initial cost of use, high levels of security and scalability, and its developer-friendly API.

Solution

As a first step, Stripe Billing was implemented to handle payments for the Limitless Plan. This enables Stripe to manage everything from storing and handling credit card numbers, to verifying usability and checking for fraudulent activity. Stripe Billing also takes care of renewal requests when cards expire, significantly reducing the operational burden on Atmoph.

"Being able to avoid implementing the highly complex process of receiving and managing credit card numbers in-house is extremely helpful," said Nakano.

In addition, Atmoph was among the first to adopt Stripe's instalment payment feature upon its release, enabling instalment payments for its main product – the Atmoph Window. Because all required information can be entered via Stripe's form, there was no need to implement complex logic for processing addresses or post codes, allowing for a smooth rollout of the instalment option.

Results

Reduced development time by six months

By leveraging Stripe, Atmoph was able to achieve a robust implementation of key business functions – such as product sales and subscription management – in a short time. If Atmoph had developed these functions in-house, the company estimates that reaching the same level of quality would have delayed the product release by at least six months.

Improved cash flow management

Stripe's card instalment payments provide immediate payouts to the business, regardless of the number of instalments selected by the customer. This allowed Atmoph to meet customer needs without compromising cash flow.

¥100 million growth in annual recurring revenue

By using Stripe, Atmoph was able to concentrate on developing the core aspects of its product without having to allocate resources to payment implementation. Accelerating time to market enabled the company to achieve annual recurring revenue of around ¥100 million through content sales and subscription services alone.