Challenge

US-based FilmFreeway is the world’s largest platform for managing film festivals—collecting submissions, promoting events, and selling tickets and passes for thousands of festivals. A key part of that service is collecting submission fees from hundreds of thousands of filmmakers each year and paying those funds out to festival organizers.

FilmFreeway originally built its financial infrastructure by stitching together several third-party technologies to collect payments and onboard festivals to the platform, but that system became unsustainable as the platform grew, due to the limited technical capabilities of its providers.

Managing payouts proved especially challenging. The FilmFreeway team had to manually estimate payout volumes, allocate funds, and then oversee the individual festival payouts.

The multiple provider system also increased transaction costs and limited FilmFreeway’s visibility into its overall financial picture, since data was fragmented and transaction flows were not transparent.

FilmFreeway needed a modern system that could automate payouts, simplify onboarding, improve reporting, reduce costs, limit fraud, and provide a better user experience for filmmakers and festivals.

“The goal was to replace our legacy payout system with a single, reliable provider,” said Matt Toigo, general manager at FilmFreeway. “We needed a solution capable of managing payouts to thousands of festivals that we could easily implement without disrupting operations.”

Solution

In August 2025, FilmFreeway enlisted Insight—a leading technology solutions integrator and Stripe Services Premier Partner specializing in complex payment deployments—to build a unified platform on Stripe Connect for routing payments between filmmakers and festivals. Working closely with FilmFreeway’s engineers, Insight AI mapped the payment routing logic, designed the Connect architecture, and built automated payout flows. Throughout the engagement, Insight AI helped to accelerate development and validate the integration, combining technical expertise with the delivery capacity to take the project from design to production.

With Connect, FilmFreeway built an automated monthly payout process that eliminated the need to manually create recipient lists or initiate individual transactions. Now, once a festival is onboarded, it can receive payouts automatically. To improve the registration process, FilmFreeway uses Stripe-hosted onboarding, which collects all the necessary banking information from film festivals and automates Know Your Customer (KYC) compliance to verify the identities of new registrants.

To further discourage fraud risk, FilmFreeway used Connect’s routing architecture to set up a separate payout flow for festivals that are new to the platform. Funds are collected from filmmakers up front but are not paid out to festival organizers until after the event has concluded, helping verify that the festival is legitimate.

With its Connect integration, FilmFreeway now processes all online payments on the platform with Stripe Payments in a PCI-compliant manner. To create a quick, intuitive checkout experience, FilmFreeway adopted Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite, which includes embeddable payment UIs through Stripe Checkout, international payment methods, and Link—a digital wallet built by Stripe. FilmFreeway used the payment element to easily enable several payment methods, including credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Amazon Pay. With nearly half of filmmakers on FilmFreeway already having a Link account, returning filmmakers benefit from a faster checkout experience.

By consolidating its financial infrastructure on Connect, FilmFreeway gained access to centralized reporting through the Stripe Dashboard, with advanced insight into payment authorization rates, payment method preferences, payout trends, and other useful data.

Results

Connect integration was completed six weeks ahead of schedule

Relying on Stripe’s straightforward documentation and Insight’s platform engineering expertise, FilmFreeway integrated Connect into its platform in eight weeks—nearly halving its anticipated timeline of 14 weeks—with minimal disruption to existing operations.

“This speed to market meant we were able to automate payouts, improve payment flows, and increase visibility into our finances quickly, while realizing cost savings and revenue gains even sooner than expected,” said Toigo.

Automated payouts helped FilmFreeway achieve a more efficient operational flow

With Connect, FilmFreeway automated monthly payouts to thousands of film festivals around the world. The new payout system reduced the operational burden associated with managing transactions across multiple providers, so FilmFreeway’s lean team can focus on growing the business.

“We’re confident a new festival customer will be paid out successfully because we’re connected to a verified bank account for each user, as opposed to just an email address with our former provider,” said Toigo. “Our monthly payout process is much smoother.”

FilmFreeway improved its financial decision-making with the Stripe Dashboard

Having gained a centralized reporting structure with Stripe, FilmFreeway is now able to use analytical tools embedded in the Stripe Dashboard to observe trends in how payouts change over time, import Stripe data into its internal data warehouse for reconciliation and recordkeeping, and plan better around fluctuations in cash flow.

About Insight AI

Insight AI is a comprehensive suite of services and expertise that helps businesses move from ideation to ROI. Combining deep Stripe expertise with an AI-powered software development lifecycle, Insight designs, builds, and deploys solutions faster—without sacrificing quality. Learn more about Insight.