WISAM HIRZALLA: Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining us today. In yesterday’s keynote, you heard about how Stripe is building across four product areas: payments, revenue, connect, and money management. So in this session, we’re going to focus on the roadmap for our revenue products. 

These are the products that help you monetize and manage your entire revenue life cycle. So let’s start with Billing. Billing helps you set up any pricing model so you can generate revenue. Tax and Revenue Recognition automate the tax and accounting compliance process. And then, Dashboard analytics and data products are like the insights so you can grow. 

But what does this actually look like in real life, and what does it look like in a world where AI is changing everything about how businesses operate and monetize their products? So let’s take Intercom. There’s been a bunch of sessions where we talked about Intercom today. 

So Intercom launched an AI-powered support agent, and when they launched that support agent, they didn’t want to use subscription pricing. Instead, they wanted to use outcome-based pricing, and what that practically means is that they only wanted to charge when there’s a successful resolution by the agent. This is usually a really challenging and tedious task for billing systems, and Intercom was able to go live in only five months, which is super fast for a project of this type of complexity. 

So it’s likely that everybody here in this room has a similarly innovative project, whether you’re evolving a pricing model, or you’re expanding into a new country, you’re looking for new avenues for growth, your infrastructure should not hold you back. 

Now, we’re proud that over 300,000 of you trust our revenue management tools to grow and manage your revenue, or as one user told me, stop revenue management from keeping you up at night. While we’re honored to have been recognized as a leader in billing by Gartner and Forrester as part of the Forrester wave, as well as a leader in tax by IDC, we’re nowhere done building. 

Now, working with all of you has taught us a lot, and that’s why we’re making sure that our roadmap aligns with your evolving needs. Every time I talk to users, I hear really consistent things. First, they want a billing system that can adapt to the evolving business models. They want tax compliance to be frictionless and not a full-time job. And they want the insights that help you take action so you can grow your business. 

So over the next 20 minutes, we’re gonna talk about how your feedback has shaped our 2025 roadmap and beyond. So let’s kick off. And let’s start with how businesses are generating revenue today. 

So we did a recent survey that showed that 71% of global business leaders want to launch new pricing. That’s not very surprising. Pricing is a really powerful growth lever. But here’s the catch: 50% of CFOs doubt that their infra can support these changes. I personally find this to be a shocking and really dismaying stat. Many of you might be facing the same challenge. So you have a creative pricing idea, whether it’s committed spend, milestone-based pricing, a custom discount, and your system is holding you back. So here’s what we’re working on to help. 

Now, let’s meet our demo company, Hypernian. So Hypernian is growing its business, and it wanted to start with an AI assistant. And as they built this AI assistant, they didn’t want to do the simple subscription model. They wanted to do a usage-based model. This typically requires engineering to manually code new logic, which is really hard to test and is very slow to market. So now, let me show you how you’re changing that with our new rate card editor. 

So rate card editor is an early preview of a significantly easier and a completely new way of building pricing, with no code, right in the dashboard. So in a few clicks, Hypernian can create a new pricing plan. That pricing plan is usage-based for their AI assistants. They can manage all their versions centrally. And it’s integrated with checkout for a seamless customer experience. And when you think about pricing, pricing is never done, right? You iterate on pricing, you change pricing. 

So this notion of being able to very easily manage versioning with the rate card editor is a game changer. And it’ll allow you to transition your customers between various pricing versions without a risky migration problem or errors. You can do it all with no code and in the dashboard. So rate cards is just one example about how we’re building capabilities for you to set the pace for getting products to market, without having to worry about your billing system. 

We’re going to be building more on top of rate card so you can launch any pricing model that you dream, whether it’s success-based, complex pricing, or hybrid. You’ll be able to do it all on top of rate card without writing any code. 

So now, speaking of customization, you’ve told us that the right discount can make or break a product launch. If anybody was here for the session that was before this about pricing and packaging, users who are using discounting are making a lot more money than users who are not using discounting. But building a custom promo is pretty challenging. We want to change that. 

So at yesterday’s keynote, we gave you a sneak peek of Stripe Scripts. So Stripe Scripts allows you to deploy and create custom billing logic right inside of Stripe Billing. One example is making custom promos much simpler. So let’s go back to Hypernian and take a closer look. 

So with one just short snippet of code, you can create a fully custom discount to encourage plan adoption. So in this example that’s on the screen, you can easily build a coupon that is 15% off, you can cap it at $30, and you can have it only apply to certain subscriptions. So if you’ve ever managed a billing system, you know about the usual trade-off. You can spend months on flexibility, or you can settle for a rigid out-of-the-box solution. With Scripts, you don’t have to make that compromise. You get deep customization with minimal code. 

Later this year, Scripts is going to be available across the Stripe platform so you can build custom logic for one-time payments as well. We’re also exploring a community for Scripts. So if you think about this, this is basically a marketplace where users can basically post their logic and their custom logic that they’ve built on top of Stripe Billing, and we can share that logic with other Stripe users. 

So now let’s talk about something many of you have been asking for, which is making billing work better with existing tools and systems. So we’re excited to share that you will be able to process payments on other processors and still use Stripe Billing. So customers like Nvidia are already testing this. So Nvidia already migrated its entire subscriber base in just six weeks. And by the end of this year, the ability to process payments on other payment processors is going to be generally available, so everyone can take advantage of this. 

We’re also expanding the integrations with the ecosystem, starting with tax tools. So any user who’s using Avalara, Anrok, or Sphere can now start auto-calculating tax on subscriptions and invoicing by installing a really simple app. And last, but certainly not least, we’re working on a bunch of really practical improvements to make billing easier. 

So billing models are complicated. So soon you’ll be able to take a subscription and combine that subscription that has different intervals. So a subscription that perhaps has some things that are billing monthly and some things that are billing annually, you’ll be able to do that. You’ll be able, for a better customer experience, to send one consolidated invoice that takes multiple subscriptions underneath it. You’ll be able to revise Stripe invoices a lot more easily. 

You’ll be able to unapply payments from Stripe invoices in the event of a human error or if your accounting team needs to do that. And you’ll be able to also set up payment plans on top of Stripe Invoicing. All of this is about making billing more flexible so we can serve more of your use cases. 

So for our early adopters, the impact of all these capabilities is really clear. TF1 was able to grow revenue 40% faster with new pricing launches. Intercom was able to build discounts for its AI products in days instead of months. And Nvidia is piloting ways to simplify its billing operations. Each of these users had a challenge that they turned into a growth opportunity. 

And now I’d like to take it over to Lydia to cover how we automate the revenue process. 

LYDIA CHEN: Thanks, Wisam. It’s time now to talk about my favorite topic, staying tax compliant. I’m seeing some doubtful faces in there, so maybe it’s just me. But this is exactly why we need to have this conversation. 

When we talk to our users, the story is actually remarkably consistent. You find that product market fit, and you want to start investing in growth. But if you don’t have the right systems in place, tax complexity can become this unexpected speed bump in your journey. And that is only getting more complex by the day. 

Last year alone, we saw hundreds of new tax rate changes and new tax legislation passed around the world. For example, Louisiana now applies sales tax to all manner of digital goods, including audiobooks, games, and, yes, your SaaS software as well. Brazil is completely overhauling their tax system in 2026, and the EU recently ruled that if you have even a single virtual participant in your event that’s from the EU, you need to register for VAT and also perform country-specific tax calculations. 

This is the reality of doing global business today. And many companies are dedicating significant time and resources to stay on top of these challenges, resources that could be better spent building your product, talking to your users, or growing your business. So this is why we built Stripe Tax, to turn this compliance headache into a process that just works for you.

Some of you may know that up until now, Stripe Tax has primarily been focused on tax calculation and collection. But as this user points out, that’s only one part of the tax compliance journey. True tax compliance also includes registering with the right authorities at the right time and filing your tax returns on time, every time. That’s why we’re excited to announce that Stripe Tax is now an all-in-one global tax compliance solution. Let’s take a look at how that works. 

Stripe tracks your transactions across global tax thresholds and will automatically notify you when and where you may need to collect taxes. Back to our demo company, Hypernian, they’ve just met their tax threshold in Texas. And since they’ve registered with Stripe before, all of their information is actually prefilled into this process, making the entire submission take less than a minute. 

And once it’s submitted here, Stripe’s tax team or one of our registration partners will submit an application on your behalf within the next 30 days. You’ll get confirmation in your Stripe Dashboard, and that’s it. Stripe is already calculating and collecting tax in this new location for you. Filing can also be as seamless through our new Taxually partnership. After downloading the Taxually app from the Stripe App Marketplace, you’ll see all your active registrations and their status, which gives you a clear picture of your global tax obligations. 

One click here will show you everything you need to know. All your filings, their status, and the amount that you owe in every location. We can see here that New Zealand, Mexico, and Texas are now ready for filing. You have two options: you can either approve them here in the app, or you can enable auto-approval in the future to even further streamline that process. Once you’re filed, you’ll get a confirmation in the Dashboard, and that status will update automatically. That’s it. Global filing can be as easy as a few clicks.

Stripe Tax is now available in over 100 countries, and we also support over 600 different types of products, including digital, physical, and service-type goods. We’re adding support for some of your highest-demand verticals, like events and ticketing this year. And by the end of the year, we will have expanded country and industry coverage to cover the vast majority of Stripe users’ businesses. So if there’s one thing you take away from the last couple of minutes, it’s that—no matter where you do business or what you sell—Stripe Tax can help you stay compliant, with an automated process that just works.

For fast-moving SaaS companies like Outseta, this helped them go from constantly monitoring their tax obligations to entering 50 new geographies quickly and confidently. And best of all, it freed up hours of time for their finance and engineering teams, instead of manually coding tax logic or doing tax research, instead they can focus on growth.

If you’re interested in hearing more about how you can make tax work for you, instead of the other way around, you can join us back in this room at 1:45 p.m. today. But for now, speaking of growth, I’m going to hand it over to Asavari.

ASAVARI TAYAL: Thanks, Lydia. All right. Now, let’s talk about growing your business and retaining those customers you work so hard to acquire. Customer acquisition can be expensive. In fact, acquiring a new customer often costs about 5 to 25 times that of retaining an existing one. Yet there’s a common blind spot. Most companies struggle to understand why their customers are leaving.

One of our customers, tl;dv, AI-powered meeting assistant, recently struggled with this exact challenge. When their growth rate temporarily changed, they were trying to understand if it was seasonality or something more serious happening. They spent hours trying to figure out by comparing the trend to other AI businesses in the market.

Let me show you how we made their analysis much easier. Let’s begin by taking a look at our new and improved subscription metrics. These metrics are now updated hourly. This means you can stay abreast of the latest changes in your business and react almost immediately as anything occurs rather than days after the fact.

In fact, you can slice and dice these metrics to focus on a specific segment of your business. For example, you can filter the churn rate to focus on a specific product or a specific plan that you’re investigating. And if you notice anything concerning, you can immediately drill down to look at the underlying customer data for customers that churned. You can start using these faster, fully interactive metrics in the Stripe Dashboard today. 

Now, having data is one thing, but knowing if you’re performing good or bad is entirely another. That’s where smart benchmarking comes in. Stripe now automatically finds peers for you based on your industry sector and operating factors like revenue scale. This helps you get a better gauge of how you’re performing compared to other similar businesses that are also running on Stripe. 

Now, we can see for our demo business, Hypernian, their churn rate is in the 37th percentile compared to 200 other similar businesses. Being below the median means they need to investigate and take some action. Perhaps their cancellation flow needs improvement, pricing isn’t aligned with value, or maybe customer support needs strengthening. 

This is a highly actionable insight for their exec team and for their growth team. Starting today, smart benchmarking is available for all Stripe Billing users in the Stripe Dashboard. For tl;dv, our customer that is an AI-powered meeting assistant, these fast contextual insights enable them to move fast and get much smarter about the growth bets they were making within their company. 

And we’re just getting started. Later this year, we’re adding more granular churn insights. We’re using AI to help flag customers that are at risk of churning. Maybe their metered usage is dropping, or they signed up with a specific discount coupon that’s associated with churn historically. We’ll help you identify these customers so you can reengage them and retain them at the right time. 

All right. With that, to answer your questions now, we’ll have the speakers onstage. 

WISAM HIRZALLA: All right. So I hope everybody’s as excited as I am for these announcements. 

So before Q&A, I just want to do a recap of what we just discussed. So like Intercom, your revenue infrastructure should accelerate your business and not slow it down. You should be able to launch any pricing model and expand into new markets without worrying about tax compliance, like Outseta. And like tl;dv, you should be able to access real-time data to seize opportunities as they arrive. 

So that’s what we’re building. That’s the tools that will turn ambitious ideas into reality. And with that, why don’t we go to Q&A? Let’s see if this actually works. All right. We got one. It’s one live question for you, Asavari. “Will Stripe introduce benchmarking for more metrics beyond just billing?” 

ASAVARI TAYAL: Great question. We do plan to bring the very same peer matching and the benchmarking experience to checkout and payment metrics as well, as well as more billing metrics later this year. 

WISAM HIRZALLA: Great. Lydia, merchant of record is a hot topic. “Can you tell us a little bit about Merchant of Record and Tax Remittance and how the tax team is thinking about that model?” 

LYDIA CHEN: Yeah, it’s a great topic. 

For those who might not be familiar, Merchant of Record is a model where a platform like Stripe actually takes your liability and actually sort of removes the need for you to file and remit taxes on your own separately. Stripe actually announced a very exciting acquisition of a company called Lemon Squeezy earlier this year, and the Stripe Tax team is working really closely with them to also offer Merchant of Record as a solution that folks can use with Stripe Tax or independently of Stripe Tax to stay compliant in countries around the world. 

WISAM HIRZALLA: Great, awesome. 

Okay, we have a question here that says: “You mentioned that Stripe Billing will work with payment processes by other payment processors. Will other Stripe products like Tax and Analytics also work with them, too?” I’ll take a first pass at this question, and then I’ll have Lydia and Asavari add on. So, like we said with Billing, the ability to now process payments on other payment processors is in private preview. You can request access in the documents, and it will be generally available later this year. 

When you process a payment on top of Stripe Billing using another processor, those analytics that flow through Billing Analytics are available to you as part of Stripe Billing. So you can really think about Billing Analytics as a single pane of glass, which will allow you to have all of your subscriptions analytics, irrespective of the payment processor. 

Asavari, is there anything you’d add on the analytics piece? 

ASAVARI TAYAL: Yeah, that’s spot on for Billing Analytics, but also with our custom reporting tools like Sigma and STP, the same data will also flow through, so you can report in a system of your choice. 

WISAM HIRZALLA: Great. Lydia, do you want to talk a little bit about the processor agnostic and Tax? 

LYDIA CHEN: Yeah, sure. 

So Stripe Tax actually sort of natively works with all types of payment processors through our very flexible Stripe Tax API. But as Billing is supporting other payment processors, we’re also working very closely to make sure that our native billing integration also works with all of these payment processors. So the short answer is yes. 

WISAM HIRZALLA: Great, awesome. I’ve heard this question so many times, so I’ll ask it in the room here. How does Stripe determine who my peers are for benchmarking? What’s the magic sauce there, Asavari? 

ASAVARI TAYAL: Yeah, great question. 

So a few things. We do use the information that you give us, things like the website information and your product descriptions in Stripe. We use AI to identify what industry sector you belong to, whether you are an AI SaaS business or you’re an online apparel business. That’s one of the major factors that goes into it. 

Additionally, we also use operational factors like your revenue scale based on ARR and ARPU metrics. All of this information, together, we apply ML to find the nearest peers or the nearest closest peers that are similar to that for your business. 

WISAM HIRZALLA: Great. Okay. 

How is AI changing how you build your products and roadmap? We only have a few minutes to answer this question. So maybe, Lydia, do you want to start, and we can add on? 

LYDIA CHEN: Sure. Yeah, I think tons of applications, I think many that have been talked about in the keynote and others. For Tax specifically, I’ll highlight a few items. You know, tax compliance is often viewed as this kind of very overwhelming thing where there’s a lot of different sources of information that you have to go and put together, which is kind of a perfect use case for AI. 

So we’re definitely using AI and thinking about how we recommend compliance suggestions to users. Product categorization is one that often comes up, sort of like nexus and tax obligation determination. So over the next few months, we’re using AI in a lot of different ways, kind of both in the background and exposed to users, to help them kind of compare their tax and risk posture to other similar users in their cohort. 

WISAM HIRZALLA: Great. Asavari, how about what’s going on in analytics and AI? 

ASAVARI TAYAL: Yeah, this one we’re very excited about. We’re more and more thinking about how can we automate the most common analyses that you’re performing on your Stripe data today. Last year, we did introduce Automated Trend Insights, so being able to automatically go ahead and summarize how your growth trend has been changing over time. 

Is there seasonality that we’re observing with respect to how your business is performing? Are there anomalous behaviors, and maybe you want to do something about that anomaly? We talked about churn detection. So we’re more and more thinking about how can we take away some of the pain from you, do that automatically within the Stripe Dashboard so you can really focus on the action part of it.

WISAM HIRZALLA: Right. I think on the Billing side of the house, you know, like, modeling, pricing, and packaging in a billing system is a very tedious and complex task. So I think we’re, one of the things that we’re really looking at closely is, you know, we’re piloting, for example, a natural language model as part of our product catalogue. You know, ideally you should be able to tell an LLM, just like you would do with like a Cursor or a Lovable, “Hey, here is the structure of my SKU, it has these many entitlements, it bills monthly, you know, these are all of its characteristics,” and describe that in natural language, and then that should be able to be easily modeled as part of Stripe Billing. So similar to Tax, we’re just thinking about all of the really rote, grind-y tasks in Billing and seeing if we can simplify them, using AI, so our users can get to market faster.

Okay, I see one more question here. “What are the most important features for Billing to get right over the next 12 months?”

Yeah, I think, look, the thing that keeps me up at night is I want to make sure that Stripe Billing makes it really easy for any user to get to market with any pricing model of their choice. I think particularly with the advent of AI, pricing models are more complicated than ever. And they sit at the intersection of usage-based billing and subscriptions.

So if you look at a really popular pricing model today, it’s typically a pricing plan, which has a number of entitlements underneath it. So it’ll be, for example, $50 a month and it’ll have 10,000 API calls; some of them are fast, some of them are slow, and different entitlements. That’s a tricky pricing model to model in a billing system. And then there’s a bunch of conditions that happens when the customer goes into overage, right? Sometimes they require an upgrade into another plan; sometimes they just pay for a specific overage. That is a complex pricing model. We want to make sure that we can support that. So we’re investing a lot to make Billing more flexible, to make pricing plans more easy to model.

And we also want to make sure that the iteration is easy to manage. That’s why we talked a lot today in the rate card editor about—it’s really easy to manage a version. You know, if you go and sign up for the rate card preview, it is as easy as moving all of your customers from version one to version two with two clicks. Which I think is going to be super important, given how much people are iterating on pricing.

Okay, I think we have time, maybe, like for one more. This is a tricky one.

“Are traditional, incumbent ERPs like NetSuite adapting quickly to these changes? Is there an opportunity for modern ERPs to work better or faster?”

Yeah, you know, I’m not an expert on ERPs, but I say that, you know, we surround the ERP very well. Like one thing that I think we are seeing is that, many users of NetSuite, SAP, or others use Stripe Invoicing as the last mile for their invoices instead of the ERP invoice. And that integration is actually quite simple. And the reason that our users are doing that is that Stripe invoices get paid very fast, right?

So if you think about a cash conversion cycle, or if you think about collections, right, like if your invoice is getting paid in two days instead of 30 days and if your invoice has built-in capabilities where a payment can be retried, it has all the payment methods available, that’s like a really meaningful thing for your cash convergence cycle and a really meaningful thing for your working capital. So we see a lot of, I think, last-mile invoicing that is being bolted on top of ERPs, incumbent and modern as well. 

Okay, I think that was our last question. Thank you, everybody. We’re so excited about everything that we’re shipping here, and we hope that you will give it a try. And enjoy the rest of Sessions.