Challenge

Entrepreneurs Dylan Fournier and Romain Torres collaborated on many successful mobile apps over the years, and each time they faced a similar conundrum: how to generate awareness for their new product in a crowded online marketplace. Typically, it took spending hefty sums on content creation and distribution, including paid partnerships with thousands of social media influencers.

"We wanted to lower that barrier and make it easier to communicate the value of products," said Dylan.

Dylan and Romain launched Arcads in January 2024, creating a platform that lets users generate shareable video ads in minutes by choosing AI actors and pre-written scripts. Operating with a team of five, their first priority was signing up early adopters who would provide feedback to improve the product and determine fair pricing. They needed a payment platform they could implement immediately with light development effort that could scale with the company as it grew.

Long term, the Arcads team sought a billing partner that would support multiple subscription tiers for a range of users, including enterprise-level clients, with flexibility to adjust as the business model evolved. Arcads also expected to serve a global customer base, so it needed a provider with a strong track record of payment success that offered multiple payment methods and currencies.

Solution

Stripe was a natural choice to achieve Arcads' goal of launching quickly and accepting payments on day one. "Many top brands in the SaaS world and the AI world use Stripe, so we didn't even compare them to other options," said Dylan.

Arcads built its initial roster of paying customers using Payment Links. The Arcads team negotiated prices directly with early customers, then used Payment Links to create a full payment page in just a few clicks, which they shared with users via email. After gathering feedback and deciding on a pricing structure, Arcads implemented Stripe Billing to establish three subscription plans with automated recurring billing, including an enterprise-level plan with custom pricing.

Through Billing's integration with Stripe Payments, Arcads gained access to Authorisation Boost, which unifies Stripe's acceptance optimisations and 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. To reduce involuntary churn, Arcads added Smart Retries, which identifies the optimal day and time to retry a payment. Finally, Arcads adopted Stripe Radar for Fraud Teams to combat fraudulent transactions.

Using Stripe Checkout, Arcads enabled several payment methods—including credit cards, bank transfers, Klarna, Apple Pay, and Google Pay – with a prebuilt payment form optimised for conversion that allows for easy and secure acceptance of one-time payments. This streamlined integration process not only made it easy for Arcads' developers but also helped them get to market faster, ultimately enhancing the user experience with flexible payment options.

Results

One developer to implement Billing and launch subscriptions

Arcads set up subscriptions with a single developer, given Billing's ease of integration. The light integration load allowed the company's lean team to focus on product development and growing the business. Arcads now earns 100% of its revenue from subscriptions via Billing.

Arcads uses Billing to adapt and optimise its pricing and subscription models

With Billing, the Arcads team has accommodated requests by enterprise clients for custom multiyear subscription plans and other unique customer needs. In addition, Arcads plans to use Billing's modelling tools to test free trials and new pricing structures.

"There's so much room for optimisation," said Dylan. "We know it will be doable through Stripe."

Arcads captures US$124,000 through Authorisation Boost

Authorisation Boost increased Arcads' payment acceptance rate by 2.3% over the past 12 months, representing approximately US$124,000 in additional payment volume.

Revenue climbs to US$10 million in Arcads' second year on Stripe

Arcads has quickly become a go-to platform for businesses and prosumers to create commercial-grade AI videos, with more than 5,000 subscribers as of 2025. The company earned US$4.2 million in revenue in 2024 and expects to surpass US$13 million in 2025.