Challenge

Founded in 2008 in Geneva, Switzerland, Sonar provides the key, independent verification of all code—AI-generated and developer-written—so development teams can find and fix security, reliability, and maintainability issues quickly and effectively. Sonar’s solutions are used by more than 7 million developers across 400,000 organizations, including Barclays, Mastercard, and T-Mobile.

In 2017, Sonar created a billing system using a homegrown subscription system with a third-party payment processor to scale its offerings and drive growth. The system supported online self-serve subscription sales for Sonar’s SaaS offering of its flagship product, SonarQube, which analyzes the security, reliability, and maintainability of more than 750 billion lines of code every day. The SaaS offering, SonarQube Cloud, was initially only sold online.

While the billing system supported Sonar’s expansion to more than 27,000 customers and new products, it could no longer easily handle growing demand. The subscription system was inflexible, requiring significant planning and manual coding to implement changes. Sonar also experienced low acceptance rates and high 3D Secure (3DS) rejection rates due to blocked subscription renewals, particularly in India.

The subscription system for SonarQube Cloud was managing both online and sales-led subscriptions for the SaaS offering. Subscriptions for Sonar’s self-managed offering, SonarQube Server, were separately managed. Sonar wanted a new system that could improve its operations to scale, support all subscription types, and meet the standards of current and future enterprise customers.

Sonar also managed three repositories for its customer and subscription data. Capturing insights was complex, requiring time-consuming requests to the data or engineering teams. The company wanted a unified system to empower its teams to access and analyze data for more efficient business insights.

Due to the scope of the transformation, Sonar sought a strategic partner with a global footprint that could support its substantial base of global and US customers—and scale its business into the future.

Solution

After comparing several providers, it was clear that Stripe met Sonar’s requirements. Sonar valued Stripe’s developer-friendly and open API approach. Stripe’s modular architecture and flexibility to layer additional components and features would enable Sonar to extend its capabilities.

Stripe’s professional services guided Sonar through a six-week strategic discovery to analyze its systems and processes and plan the transformation, before guiding the full integration. “Our model and plan were informed by reality, which was invaluable,” said Andrea Malagodi, chief technology officer.

Sonar replaced its subscription system with Stripe Billing to consolidate its self-serve and sales-sold subscriptions into one system for recurring payments. Sonar has integrated subscription trials into the same customer flow as paid customers, making a seamless upgrade path for customers and sales leads. Stripe Billing’s automated renewals have reduced friction with subscription renewals, and Stripe’s prebuilt email notifications to confirm payments in India have significantly improved the experience and 3DS challenges.

Sonar implemented Stripe Payments to scale its payment processing and increase acceptance rates. With Payments, Sonar now uses several optimizations to improve its acceptance rate, including card account updater, network tokens, Smart Retries, and Adaptive Acceptance—which uses AI to optimize initial payment requests and automatically identify and retry false declines in real time.

With Billing and Payments, Sonar can now view and manage its customer data in a single platform, simplifying operations. Later in 2025, Sonar began using Billing for sales-led customers, offering new payment methods such as bank transfers and invoice payments.

To improve data reporting, Sonar used the Stripe Data Pipeline to send Stripe data to its Amazon Redshift repository. Consolidating the company’s business data gave Sonar a more holistic view for faster insights and decision-making. Sonar also added Stripe Sigma to give more teams access to data quickly, using natural language to ask questions and extract insights directly within the Stripe Dashboard.

Following Sonar’s Stripe launch, it partnered with Stripe’s professional services and data migration teams to migrate self-serve subscriptions via Stripe’s subscription API with multicurrency support using API scripts. The teams migrated more than 360,900 subscriptions in under 8 weeks.

“We had confidence knowing Stripe had done this, and we could rely on their migration expertise,” said Malagodi.

Sonar’s migration of sales-sold subscriptions has started, with an expectation for it to be finalized in 2026.

Partnering with Stripe’s professional services helped Sonar maintain momentum across concurrent work streams and trained its teams through workshops focused on Stripe features and post-launch operations. “Having access to deep engineering skills to give real examples and guide our developers through complex scenarios was really valuable to us,” said Malagodi.

Sonar also worked in parallel with Stripe’s enterprise support for four months prior to launch to ensure support was in place to optimize and grow on Stripe post-launch. The teams are also now partnering to create internal reporting models that facilitate standardized leadership reports and additional dashboards by combining data from Stripe with other internal data sources.

Results

A single payments and subscription platform with 61% trial conversion rate

With Billing and Payments, Sonar can now capture its trial subscriptions and provide customers with a seamless upgrade path, resulting in a 61% conversion rate. After consolidating its subscription and payment systems into Stripe’s user-friendly platform, Sonar has simplified operations, reduced daily work, and deprecated old processes and systems. Stripe manages all updates, risk, and compliance, so Sonar can focus on expanding its offerings.

Stripe Payments and Billing improve Sonar’s payment performance with 97%+ acceptance rate

Since transitioning to Stripe, Sonar is now seeing an acceptance rate of over 97%. Optimizations—such as Adaptive Acceptance, Smart Retries, and network tokens—drive an additional 4.5% increase in payment success. Additionally, Billing helped Sonar resolve its 3DS rejection issues by reducing friction with automated subscription renewals and email notifications to confirm payments, resulting in a 0.36% rejection rate after switching to Stripe.

“If there’s a rejection because of a technical issue, we have no control over that. To have Stripe focusing on these features and capabilities helps us immensely,” said Malagodi.

Improved business insights with Stripe Sigma and Data Pipeline

With the Data Pipeline, Sonar now has a single data access point that’s refreshed every three hours, improving business insights with robust and accurate data. Stripe Sigma empowers Sonar’s business teams to retrieve insights, reducing operational efforts and increasing confidence to discover key insights that have helped Sonar reduce churn, mitigate risks, and improve overall business understanding.

Stripe experts strengthened Sonar’s implementation and improved readiness

Sonar’s partnership with Stripe professional services ensured Sonar implemented thoughtfully from day one, avoiding costly rework and elevating the transformation to a higher level of maturity. The team provided substantial enablement support to prepare Sonar’s finance and sales operations teams for the operational changes with the new platform.

“All of the enablement support for the change management that occurred is a testament to the value of Stripe’s professional services,” said Malagodi. “It would have been a stretch to do this on our own, and it probably would have cost quite a bit more.”