Challenge

When Linear launched in 2020, the Bay Area company targeted its software development–project management tool to businesses like itself – start-ups and early-stage companies. Linear had used Stripe Atlas to incorporate and Stripe Payments for payment processing, and initially its needs were simple. It offered a free tier and a “pay what you want” subscription model as low-friction ways to attract the users needed to refine its offering.

As Linear’s knowledge of its customers grew, the company tailored its pricing model for the different types of users on its platform, which expanded to include mid-market and high-growth businesses, including many public companies. The company wanted multiple pricing tiers and alternative subscription models, with plenty of flexibility to manage licencing changes as they happened. Throughout, Linear needed a partner that could offer all these options in one place, with billing tools that could scale just as fast as it was growing and a payment solution that was optimised for conversion and global reach.

“We don’t want to manage multiple different systems and tools as we focus on building our customer base,” said Cristina Cordova, Linear’s chief operating officer. “So, it’s critically important to have the right billing and payments systems.”

Solution

To provide its customers with a variety of pricing plans while optimising for conversion, Linear chose Stripe Billing, an automated solution for managing recurring revenue, paired with Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite. The suite includes Stripe Checkout, which offers a pre-built payment form that is optimised for conversion and built for more than 30 languages and more than 135 currencies; a variety of popular payment methods; and Link, Stripe’s accelerated checkout option that saves and auto-fills customers’ payment and shipping details for a faster payment experience.

Linear customised Checkout’s colours, fonts, and brand settings to match its existing branding – an important feature for a company that prioritises “good taste” in its product design. Checkout also allowed Linear to easily upsell customers from monthly subscriptions to annual subscriptions. A simple toggle switch, set by default to the lower monthly rate for an annual subscription, incentivises users to choose that option, while Stripe handles the different prices on the backend.

Stripe Billing APIs made it easy to integrate with Linear’s platform and delivered the required flexibility to adapt to changes in Linear’s subscription offerings over the past five years. The company now has three billing tiers, plus custom pricing for enterprises. The subscription schedules integrated into Billing provide a way to automate changes to subscriptions over time, including upgrading, downgrading, or otherwise changing subscriptions. Linear uses subscription schedules to consolidate licencing changes as a way to simplify invoicing and improve the customer experience.

“The documentation is very good,” said Tom Moor, Linear’s US engineering lead. “From an engineering point of view, we can for the most part just work through that and do what needs to be done through the API.”

Results

2 days to implement Checkout and Billing

The flexibility of Stripe technology and strong documentation made it easy for Linear’s engineers to complete the initial integration and to pursue changes to its subscription and pricing options over time. For example, Linear has evolved from only offering self-serve payments to creating bespoke pricing arrangements for Fortune 100 companies.

A smooth process for receiving payments

Likewise, the Optimized Checkout Suite has been an unqualified win: Linear can support multiple payment methods – and add new ones at any time – without requiring any additional engineering time. Linear has enabled several payment methods, including Apple Pay, US bank transfers, and ACH direct debit, with bank transfers accounting for 18% of payment volume – representing Linear’s most popular payment method for larger payments. “In the last couple of years, the Optimized Checkout Suite is the biggest thing I can think of that was able to reduce engineering time and simultaneously improve the experience,” said Moor.

Subscription scheduling consolidates licence changes every 24 hours

The ability to consolidate subscription changes with subscription schedules improved the customer experience, particularly for enterprise customers. If a business adds or removes users in a day, Linear doesn’t have to manually manage them individually. Instead, Stripe schedules all license changes to trigger billing updates every 24 hours.

“This feature allows us to simplify customer invoices,” said Moor. “Otherwise, they get really unwieldy.”

A solid foundation for future growth

As Linear continues to grow, the company relies on Stripe to seamlessly run billing and payments, leaving its team free to focus on its core products. “There is a set-it-and-forget-it component to Stripe’s pureplay integration, which to me is a value add,” said Cordova. “We don’t change the core integration much over time, and new features are generally backwards compatible, all of which makes our lives easier.”