Challenge

The team of entrepreneurs who started Berlin-based Planet Wild wanted to support innovative environmental organizations by raising funds for rewilding projects such as returning endangered species to the wild, protecting forests, and cleaning waterways. The team’s goal was to build an agile fundraising platform to get money into the hands of environmental organizations quickly.

From the start, the founders made video storytelling central to their outreach. Every mission gets its own film on Planet Wild's YouTube channel, which now has 540,000 subscribers, and some reach as many as 3 million. To reach more people, Planet Wild partners with a select group of YouTube creators who share its vision for educational content that explains how nature works and shows that smart environmental solutions are possible.

The startup aimed to sponsor one restoration mission per month, which meant releasing a new video every month. “We needed a secure stream of income from members to get everything up and running, including sending crews to film on location and partnering with creators to boost member acquisition,” said Jonas Brandau, Planet Wild’s cofounder and co-chief executive officer.

Following advice that one-time donations aren’t a viable financial foundation, the Planet Wild team built its business on a membership model, which required a robust recurring billing system that offered flexibility to introduce multiple subscription tiers and test new pricing models to gauge their appeal. The company also needed support for a range of payment methods and currencies to attract a global membership base, along with tools to maximize authorization rates and recover failed payments. To bolster its marketing strategy, Planet Wild also needed to handle costs in several currencies, from mission partners around the world to its creator partnerships.

With their successful record of operating previous startups, Planet Wild’s founders knew that running the platform successfully would require robust reporting capabilities, giving them transparency into the company’s finances for clarity in decision-making. The company also prioritized powerful and easy-to-use tools to automate billing and payment integrations, so its tech team could focus on refining the platform instead of struggling with time-consuming tasks.

Solution

Planet Wild’s founders chose Stripe Billing to create a sophisticated subscription system quickly and easily. Using Billing’s flexible logic, Planet Wild moved from one fixed price for each of its three membership tiers—Starter, Hero, and Legend—to multiple preset contribution amounts and a custom amount within each tier. Each tier determines how Planet Wild recognizes members’ support, while the amount determines how much members contribute to the organization’s missions.

Using embeddable UI elements through Stripe Checkout, the Planet Wild team created and tested different configurations of its checkout page, such as changing which membership options to display and highlighting the annual option. Through Checkout, Planet Wild enabled credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, and 10 local payment methods. Those local methods include BLIK in Poland; SEPA Direct Debit, which Planet Wild is currently testing in Germany, Austria and Switzerland; iDEAL/Wero in the Netherlands; Italy-based digital wallet Satispay; and Bizum, a leading mobile payment method in Spain. Planet Wild also adopted Link, Stripe's consumer network. Before rolling out new local payment methods, Planet Wild tests their effect on conversion rates using Checkout.

Processing member contributions on Stripe Payments, which offers 99.999% historical uptime, ensured that Planet Wild’s platform would support surges in new memberships that could come when one of the company’s videos went viral. To further support its payment success rates and recover failed payments, Planet Wild implemented Stripe Authorization Boost, a bundle of AI-powered acceptance optimizations that includes card account updater, which automatically updates details for expired cards; Adaptive Acceptance, which uses AI to identify and retry false declines; and network tokens, which replace a card’s primary account number with a unique, secure identifier. Through Billing, the company also uses Smart Retries, which boosts revenue recovery by identifying the optimal day and time to retry a payment declined for insufficient funds.

Planet Wild also enabled Stripe’s multicurrency settlement capabilities to keep the US dollars it collects for its dollar costs, such as missions with partners who work in dollars and its creator partnerships in the US. That way it avoids converting dollars from members into euros, only to convert them back into dollars later.

The Planet Wild team uses the Stripe Dashboard to track its financial data and centralize reporting. More recently, Planet Wild’s engineers began using Stripe’s skills for AI agents to provide detailed instructions to AI agents that the team uses to automate the company’s integrations with Stripe APIs.

Results

Planet Wild grows ARR 115% with Stripe and funds missions with 20x more money than at launch

With its ARR growing steadily since launch and increasing 115% year over year in 2025, Planet Wild has multiplied its funding per mission. From about €10,000 for its first missions in 2023, Planet Wild's community now funds each monthly mission with typically €100,000 to €200,000, and with a record €372,000 for a rainforest protection mission in Brazil in 2025.

“Every month our members fund a new mission, and their money has to arrive reliably, in their currency and with the payment method they trust. Stripe takes care of that, so our small engineering team can work on the product instead of the plumbing,” said Andreas Pursian, Planet Wild's cofounder and chief technology officer.

68% of visitors to Planet Wild's checkout become members

Two out of three people who open a Planet Wild checkout page become members. The Planet Wild team credits this conversion rate in part to Checkout's flexibility in displaying prices and payment methods.

Nearly half of Planet Wild members pay annually, bolstering financial stability

About 46% of members choose to pay annually for Planet Wild's memberships, allowing the company to earn a robust percentage of its revenue up front and establish a nine- to 12-month timeline for properly vetting, financing, and documenting missions.

Planet Wild recovers more than 60% of failed payments with Stripe optimizations

Planet Wild has a payment recovery rate higher than 60%, accomplished with the help of Stripe’s automated payment optimization and recovery tools, including Authorization Boost and Smart Retries.

Funding missions and creator partnerships in US dollars costs less with Stripe's multicurrency payouts

As a European company that earns close to half of its income in US dollars, Planet Wild would pay conversion fees twice if every dollar were converted into euros and then back into dollars for costs in the US. With Stripe’s multicurrency settlement, Planet Wild keeps the US dollars it needs for missions with partners who work in dollars and for its creator partnerships and converts the rest.

Decision-making is easier for Planet Wild with the Stripe Dashboard

The Planet Wild team uses the Stripe Dashboard for day-to-day decisions, such as checking how a new mission launch or creator video affects sign-ups and payments. For long-term optimization, it syncs its Stripe data on revenue, churn and other measures through the API into its own data warehouse, where it analyzes A/B tests and decides on marketing spending and other business priorities. “Extracting all that information with Stripe’s open and well-documented APIs is a big benefit, especially for a small team like ours,” Pursian said.

Engineers save weeks of effort with Stripe AI skills for agents

Scanning Stripe documentation for upgrades and fixes is much faster for Planet Wild with the help of Stripe-provided instructions for agents. “With AI skills defining how we automate changes in our backend infrastructure, what used to take two weeks with one or two engineers now takes one or two days with a single person,” Pursian said.