Paddle Billing
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The company
Mayday’s mission is to mend month-end for accountants and finance teams worldwide. The company builds automation tools that reduce the traditionally lengthy month-end close process from 10-11 working days down to a single click.
Mayday was founded by James Scott-Griffin and his business partner David Tuck, an accountant who lived the month-end pain firsthand. In 2021, they began launching their products to help accountants and finance teams dealing with multi-entity pain points, revenue recognition, prepayments, and soon, accruals and balance sheet reconciliations.
What began in Griff’s kitchen as an idea became the first accounting automation tool on the App Store.
There's maybe 10 or 12 distinct processes that finance teams do at month end. We're building products to automate each of those and then manage the workflow over the top of them."
James Scott-Griffin, Co-Founder & CPTO, Mayday
After initially launching their MVP for free in return for feedback, users were later migrated onto a paid subscription starting at £35. The team is constantly iterating on Mayday’s pricing and packaging, now offering tiered pricing and add-ons.
Joining Paddle
While based in the UK, Griff and David knew that their largest market would be in Australia and New Zealand. Planning to be international from day one meant that global tax compliance was always a consideration when choosing a payment processor.
Having compliance handled for them led Mayday towards a Merchant of Record model, and they implemented Paddle Classic.
The integration process was actually really straightforward. We were up and running with Paddle Classic in maybe only a week or so, maybe two weeks of actual build time, which when you're the only developer and you're still building the main product, it was pretty good.”
James Scott-Griffin, Co-Founder & CPTO, Mayday
Mayday’s first customer was UK-based but their second and third customers were in Australia, so they were happy that Paddle supported global billing from the start.
Now 50% of Mayday’s user base is in Australia and New Zealand, with customers in South Africa, America, Canada, Asia, and the UK.
The limitations
Mayday’s pricing model included a base price that scaled every time you added an entity, with larger customer groups paying less per entity. They found that pricing in this way didn’t fit neatly into a tiered or seat-based pricing model. To combat this, Mayday had to build the logic on their side which meant that every customer was using custom pricing in the Paddle Classic dashboard.
This approach worked well for the first year, but as the business evolved, so did their pricing and packaging strategy.
At that point, we actually had three products live, and one product was applicable to every single customer. And so that formed the basis for our free plan. And then we had a light plan, which again, that product formed the basis of, and a full plan which included all three.”
James Scott-Griffin, Co-Founder & CPTO, Mayday
The team found that free and light plan users could benefit from some of the features in the full plan, and so began to offer add-ons and customized plans alongside tiered pricing.
The problem? Paddle Classic didn't support the multi-product subscription model Mayday needed.
The solution
Paddle Billing had launched just a few months before Mayday implemented this new pricing scheme.
We implemented Billing for new customers on the new pricing scheme and ran Classic in the background for everybody on the old scheme, so we grandfathered all of our customers into the plan that they were on. What that actually meant is we were running Classic and Billing in tandem for 12-18 months.”
James Scott-Griffin, Co-Founder & CPTO, Mayday
Griff found that having two integrations on both the frontend and backend still felt straightforward because customers were only ever on one version of Paddle. The intention was always to migrate all customers across to Billing to unify the billing process into one dashboard, but timing way key.
Mayday launched two more products but in order for customers on Classic to take advantage, they needed to migrate all customers to Billing.
Migrating to Paddle Billing
With about half of Mayday’s revenue still on Classic, the actual migration process seemed daunting. However, Mayday used Paddle’s self-serve migration tool and was surprised with how quick and error-free the process was.
The documentation was good so we were able to set up the additional webhooks that we needed on our side and make sure all of that was working. It was a little bit of development work and then we were able to get everyone across in the process of a couple weeks.”
James Scott-Griffin, Co-Founder & CPTO, Mayday
The migration process was methodical to ensure confidence before full migration:
Phase 1: Sandbox testing: The team created multiple test subscriptions in Paddle’s sandbox environment and ran the migration tool repeatedly to catch potential issues before touching production data.
Phase 2: Small-scale production testing: They started with a single subscription, verified everything worked correctly, then migrated a few more. They tested one plan at a time, beginning with monthly subscribers.
Phase 3: Full migration: After building complete confidence, they selected all remaining subscriptions and executed the final migration.
We did a nice phased migration process where we just did a couple and made sure they were right. And then we did a larger chunk, then we migrated everyone.”
James Scott-Griffin, Co-Founder & CPTO, Mayday
The results
10% product adoption in first three months
About 10% of our customer base are now buying these new products. A bunch of those will have been Classic subscribers who have been able to add that onto their legacy Classic plan."
James Scott-Griffin, Co-Founder & CPTO, Mayday
Within just three months of completing the migration, there was a really positive uplift of users buying Mayday’s new products that were once exclusive to Billing.
The migration was absolutely crucial for us making sure we monetized that product as best we could.”
James Scott-Griffin, Co-Founder & CPTO, Mayday
Increased ACV
With all customers now on a single platform, ACV (average contract value) increased as customers could easily adopt additional products alongside their core subscription.
Our ACV has gone up as a result of all of this, and that just wouldn't have happened if we hadn’t migrated those classic subscribers to Billing."
James Scott-Griffin, Co-Founder & CPTO, Mayday
Future pricing flexibility
Moving to Billing gave Mayday the flexibility to implement more modern pricing and packaging strategies across their entire customer base, not just new customers.
Now that they're all in one billing system, we're able to give them more options about the plans that they use. That also improves our revenue retention."
James Scott-Griffin, Co-Founder & CPTO, Mayday
Improved invoicing system
The decision to move to Billing was driven by Mayday’s pricing and packaging strategy but it also streamlined other processes. Around the time of migration, they were launching a bureau license giving accounting firms the ability to buy a bundle of Mayday licenses.
Being an accounting firm, those customers wanted to do that more through a sort of invoicing and PO system. Billing obviously had a more robust invoicing system than Classic did, so we were better able to do that through Billing.”
James Scott-Griffin, Co-Founder & CPTO, Mayday
Looking ahead
The migration to Paddle Billing has positioned Mayday to continue expanding their product suite without billing limitations. With their entire customer base now on a unified platform, they can quickly roll out new features and products to all customers, regardless of when they originally signed up.
It’s been really brilliant. That move to Billing was fundamental to us successfully launching new products.”
James Scott-Griffin, Co-Founder & CPTO, Mayday
As Mayday continues building out their automation suite, they can focus on product development rather than billing limitations, confident that their payments infrastructure can support whatever pricing and packaging strategies their business requires.
Ready to unlock flexible pricing and multi-product with Paddle Billing? Get started today.
