Challenge

Higgsfield has revolutionized video content production by providing a generative AI platform where social media creators and marketers can produce cinema-quality videos in minutes instead of months. Founded in 2023, the San Francisco startup iterated on its generative AI video models for over a year before finding the product-market fit that would allow it to scale quickly into a global business.

“We ditched everything else we were working on and began building a new product—frontend, backend, ML infrastructure, marketing strategy, the growth team, everything straight from zero,” said Shotan Jakupov, data and growth lead at Higgsfield.

Implementing a subscription billing and payment system was a key step in this product development process. The company’s initial products were mobile app–based, but the fees charged by app stores made scaling challenging. Moving to a browser-based platform would allow Higgsfield to focus on the professional creator audience while reducing its payment costs.

However, with only one backend engineer available to integrate payments, Higgsfield needed to find billing and payment technology that would be easy to implement, allow the company to collect payments from around the world, and deliver a simple checkout experience that creative professionals would trust.

Solution

Higgsfield selected Stripe as its billing and payments provider in March 2025 after evaluating several options. “My team did a very deep analysis, and Stripe’s API-friendly approach definitely caught our attention. Stripe also provides a set of solutions for B2C and B2B, and is well known in the creator economy space,” said Alex Mashrabov, CEO at Higgsfield. “We felt like we couldn’t go wrong if we started with Stripe.”

Higgsfield launched its platform using Stripe Billing to manage what it expected to be a fast-growing subscription base. The team used Billing to quickly create and test new pricing tiers and launch promotional campaigns. Billing also offered AI-powered revenue recovery features like Smart Retries and automatic email reminders to help Higgsfield reduce involuntary churn and recover more revenue.

Billing’s integration with Stripe Payments meant that Higgsfield could instantly collect subscription payments from around the world. The company also chose Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite to provide a modern checkout experience for global customers. Using Stripe Checkout, a prebuilt, customizable payment form, Higgsfield enabled credit cards as well as other payment methods most commonly used by its global audience, including Pix, Kakao Pay, Naver Pay, PayCo, WeChat Pay, Klarna, Affirm, and stablecoins. Higgsfield also enabled Link, a wallet built by Stripe that lets customers check out faster by autofilling their preferred payment details. The company also uses Adaptive Pricing to display prices in local currencies for its global customers.

To improve acceptance rates, Higgsfield activated Authorization Boost, Stripe’s AI-powered product that combines acceptance optimizations like Adaptive Acceptance, network tokens, and card account updater to reduce false declines and customer churn.

Results

Higgsfield integrates Stripe in three days to launch its product within two weeks

Higgsfield integrated Stripe into its platform in just three days with a single backend engineer, allowing the company to launch its product on a two-week timeline. Using Stripe’s clear documentation and modular APIs, Higgsfield was able to integrate both Payments and Billing without diverting resources from product development.

“We just used the documentation, which was very clear. Any questions we had, we were able to answer by digging into the documentation a bit deeper,” Jakupov said.

Higgsfield exceeded a $200 million run rate in payments in 9 months

After launching its new browser-based platform in March 2025, Higgsfield grew from a $0 to $200 million run rate in processed payments per month in just 9 months using Stripe.

“As we grow, we need to pay more attention to compliance, revenue recovery, and other details, and Stripe has solutions for all of that. Stripe supports scale really well,” Mashrabov said.

75% of revenue comes from global customers

The company’s ability to accept payments globally from day one helped Higgsfield meet demand when its solution became an unexpected global hit, with 75% of revenue now coming from outside the US. Adaptive Pricing helps customers pay in their local currency, while the ability to accept stablecoins helps customers offset foreign exchange and conversion fees.

“We expected to have more from the US and less from the rest of the world; we were a little bit surprised to see high adoption in developed markets outside of the US,” Mashrabov said.

BNPL drives 438% higher average order value

Klarna delivers a 438% higher average order value compared to the average of all other payment methods Higgsfield accepts. By offering BNPL, Higgsfield is able to encourage creatives to sign up for yearly plans or premium monthly subscriptions and spread out the cost over time.

Link powers more than 40% of all checkouts

Link became a leading checkout method for Higgsfield, powering more than 40% of all transactions.

“A lot of our customers already have Link from using other services, so when they come to us, there’s zero friction to pay. Lower friction means a higher acceptance rate, so we really like offering it,” Jakupov said.

Authorization rates hit 95.6%

Thanks to AI-powered optimizations like Adaptive Acceptance and network tokens, Higgsfield achieved a 95.6% authorization rate in markets like the US, Europe, and Australia.
“We’re a global business, so we need to have an acceptance rate high enough for the whole world, not just the US. Stripe is excellent for both our Tier 1 countries and global payments, so we’re happy,” Jakupov said.

Stripe’s partnership supports future global growth

As Higgsfield continues to scale, the company is working with Stripe to refine its global payments strategy. Stripe’s team advised Higgsfield on ways to reduce cross-border network costs with stablecoins while also helping design and plan a marketplace built on Stripe Connect to allow creators to sell templates to other creators.

“Since video AI is a brand new space, this is absolutely a net-new opportunity for everyone. We need to make sure we learn every day. What is exciting for us to see is that as business scales, and sometimes in a slightly unpredictable way, Stripe always has a solution,” Mashrabov said.