Paddle Billing
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The company
Founded in 2011 as the original Instagram analytics tool, Iconosquare now empowers brands and agencies worldwide to enhance their social media impact. The platform offers everything from content scheduling and community management to data-driven insights and automation.
Based in Limoges, in the French countryside, Iconosquare serves customers in approximately 100 countries.
The company operates a tiered subscription model ranging from $39 to $119 per month for self-service plans, with additional custom enterprise solutions for sales-led opportunities. Iconosquare has refined their billing stack over time so that pricing is based on both the number of users and social platforms, as well the amount of features customers can access.
But building new payment plans and making changes to the billing process wasn’t always so easy for Iconosquare.
Joining Paddle 5+ years ago
The company originally joined Paddle at a time when they were looking to optimize their billing process without using excessive developer resource.
We chose Paddle Classic first for the tax management which allowed us to multiply quickly into markets all over the world."
Cyrille Moreau, COO and Former CTO, Iconosquare
Iconosquare needed a payment solution that could support global sales tax compliance and all stages of the monetization process - they needed more than just a checkout plug-in.
By joining Paddle Classic, Iconosquare:
- cut billing costs by 15%
- achieved better data visibility and streamlined reporting
- Started to offer a localized checkout experience, including language and currency
Read more about how Iconosquare migrated over 13,00 subscriptions to Paddle.
The limitations
Despite seeing immediate results, Iconosquare later found that Paddle Classic wasn’t as flexible as they would like when it came to managing add-ons in subscription plans. And the team at Iconosquare had developed an internal workflow for managing subscription invoices for customers after finding that invoices were not linked to customers in the Paddle Classic platform.
The experience was always quite good, except with manual invoices and the product structure in Paddle Classic. But we always found a workaround, so it always worked perfectly.”
Cyrille Moreau, COO and Former CTO, Iconosquare
Paddle Classic had taken away the burden of building a billing stack that worked, but the solution wasn’t serving all of Iconosquare's specific needs. Our team at Paddle advised Iconosquare to reduce their development resource even further by migrating to Paddle Billing.
The solution
After happily partnering with Paddle for 5 years, Cyrille started looking into Paddle Billing. He found that Billing could offer them:
- Increase product flexibility - Billing could give Iconosquare greater flexibility with managing add-ons and products within their subscriptions and SaaS plan structure
- Hybrid billing - with invoices linked to customers in Billing rather than being a part of a separate feature, Iconosquare could eradicate a manual process from their workflow
A better technical experience - Billing is API first and the platform is much more modern.
From a technical point of view, the fact that Paddle Billing was API-first and looked much more modern - of course it was even more exciting for us to implement it."
Cyrille Moreau, COO and Former CTO, Iconosquare
Iconosquare decided to migrate from Paddle Classic to Paddle Billing so that every part of the payment process could be managed in one platform.
Migrating to Paddle Billing
Full migration support
Iconosquare was using a native library in PHP framework, Laravel, and had to work with the Laravel team to migrate the library to Paddle Billing. Lavarel had retroactively decided not to manage the library across both Classic and Billing, so Iconosquare now had a short window to migrate.
Cyrille found it reassuring that the team at Paddle were in contact with the Laravel team, working very closely to migrate the library across seamlessly, reducing stress on their end.
It was cool to see that the Paddle team were really close to us, to give us advice about the migration and reassure us because when we are talking about the billing system, migrations are always quite critical.”
Cyrille Moreau, COO and Former CTO, Iconosquare
A smooth technical transition
Cyrille found that the migration was very smooth from a technical point of view, appreciating the web hooks that were implemented to inform the Iconosquare platform when each client was migrated.
It was quite a challenge for the Paddle team because we had to create a map between different plan structures. It was not easy. But it was a success, how fast and smooth the migration was.”
Cyrille Moreau, COO and Former CTO, Iconosquare
Error-free migration in 2 months
From the day that the Iconosquare team told Paddle that they wanted to migrate, the process was very fast. Despite this, it was carried out with zero errors. All of Iconosquare’s clients were migrated onto the right new plan with Billing.
Considering the additional work needed to migrate the Laravel library, moving a manual invoice process over to Paddle Billing, and team members being on annual leave, the migration process took Iconosquare just 2 months to complete.
The Results
API-first architecture
Cyrille found that while in Paddle Classic there were several end points that were not very structured, in Billing the data model is a lot more clear, as well as the overall experience and the developer documentation. Overall the developer experience has really improved.
The new API is really really easy to understand and implement. The platform is easy to use.”
Cyrille Moreau, COO and Former CTO, Iconosquare
Built-in payment recovery
Iconosquare has also implemented Retain, our smarter dunning management software, for payment recovery. Retain is built into the Paddle Billing product, and Cyrille is excited to see the impact of reduced customer churn.
I know that thanks to the new plan structure we are able to manage with Paddle billing, it's more easy for us to create some friction and upsell with our business.”
Cyrille Moreau, COO and Former CTO, Iconosquare
Connected invoice management
As Iconosquare grew and built their B2B market, managing invoices had been taking up more and more resources. Now with Paddle Billing, invoices can be part of an automated process by easily generating them in the Billing platform.
I never felt any stress about the migration. Maybe at the beginning because when we are talking about a migration, it can be tough sometimes. But week after week, we immediately understood and had the feeling that it would be okay.”
Cyrille Moreau, COO and Former CTO, Iconosquare
The future
Iconosquare's successful migration positions them perfectly for their next phase of growth, and Cyrille is looking forward to seeing how upcoming Billing features will support this.
We're looking at features like multi-line discounts and cardless trials - that is exciting."
Cyrille Moreau, COO and Former CTO, Iconosquare
The team are also hoping that in the future they will be able to customize the price of product on existing invoices, for sales-led plans with custom prices. Iconosquare is already speaking to the Paddle team about how we can support them with their B2B offering. Moving upmarket, the team values customizable billing features that will cater better to their enterprise clients.
I would say to other companies moving from Classic to Billing: take the time, trust the process and the team, and do not hesitate to ask questions and listen to the advice of the Paddle team because it was really helpful."
Cyrille Moreau, COO and Former CTO, Iconosquare
Are you a Paddle customer ready to make the move to Paddle Billing? See how to get started.
