The Story Behind Chargebee’s New Brand and Positioning

Customer-centricity has always been core to Chargebee, and it’s in everything we do. Twelve years ago, four friends — Krish, Rajaraman, KPS, and Thiyagu — came together to build a company where everything starts with people. At their core, subscription businesses are centered around relationships — the alignment of value for service forged between customer and vendor. Solving the recurring billing problem for these relationship-based businesses was the natural choice for them.

Over the past decade, the subscription industry has grown exponentially, advancing well beyond simple recurring revenue models to adaptive, scalable, and consumption-based monetization approaches that can quickly operationalize new value propositions, responsive testing, and modes of customer engagement.

“Everything that we have built is based on learning from customers. We come to understand what our fastest-growing customers need two years in the future and then continue to keep pace with them. Our vision is to provide a solution that ensures customers do not outgrow Chargebee,” says Krish Subramanian, CEO & co-founder, Chargebee.

As the needs of subscription businesses have evolved, the team recognized newer avenues for Chargebee to support revenue growth through the entire subscription lifecycle. If our customers can drive one percent improvements across every aspect of their revenue lifecycle — from price optimization, higher converting checkout experiences to opening up more payment methods and deflecting subscribers from canceling — they unlock cumulative, sustainable growth.

So in 2021 and 2022, Chargebee acquired several new products (RevRec, Receivables, Retention), as well as released core Billing features, including pricing entitlements, mobile subscriptions, and advanced multi-entity support. And today, to unify and clarify our vision to automate and enable revenue growth management through the subscriber lifecycle, we are announcing:

• A new ‘brand look and feel’ – which evokes an aesthetic and color palette that visually differentiates the Chargebee platform while bringing together a growing set of services built around our recurring billing and subscription management product
• Repositioning Chargebee as a Revenue Growth Management (RGM) platform for subscription businesses

So, what is Revenue Growth Management (RGM)?

RGM is a software platform that accelerates:

• Customer acquisition – whether that be via a sales-led CPQ process or an online/PLG motion, via a subscription, or a pay-as-you-go usage-based billing model. It offers the flexibility to launch and test pricing, incentives, multi-currency support, and purchase flows.
• Growth & Retention – in subscriptions, the name of the game is turning one-time trialists or buyers into repeat subscribers, then unlocking seamless expansion with upgrade options, including new modules and products, additional users and seats, greater usage, or bundles and options (e.g., a bundle of streaming services). RGM improves subscriber retention by enabling reduced churn and customer cancellations, optimizing the dunning and credit card payment process, and increasing customer lifetime value through better enablement of customer-facing teams and customer education.
• Scaling of financial operations – RGM enables the automation of front and back-office bookkeeping, freeing merchants to focus on core product development while equipping them with the tools to make informed decisions in real time. It also simplifies meeting revenue recognition and tax compliance requirements while tracking and improving payment collections from online, offline, and even mobile subscribers.
• Business-critical integrations with payments, finance, CRM, and data systems so the billing record can enrich and enable stakeholders and processes across the company. This may include charging in various currencies while preserving the lowest-cost payment providers, reconciling payments and revenue with financial records, keeping CRM records up to speed, and triggering marketing systems based on the latest payment records and status.

Why the new brand look?

Chargebee is proud to support the aspirations of a globally connected merchant base, who depend on our products and services every day to monetize and grow. To unify our expanded product offerings and RGM platform repositioning, we worked with Landor & Fitch on a brand design evolution that preserves our heritage while embracing this forward-looking vision.

“To visually represent this new direction, we sought to create a flexible and adaptable identity that symbolizes the transformative growth Chargebee aspires to achieve, both for their customers and for themselves,” says Damian Arce, Creative Director, Landor & Fitch. “We modernized the color palette and developed a communication system that is both adaptable and intuitive, considering all strategic factors in creating an identity that looks toward the future.”

Chargebee’s new visual identity is underpinned by three aspects – confidence, adaptability, and growth – which together reflect where we are headed and what we offer our stakeholders. Our most recognizable asset – the Chargebee “C” — is at the heart of the rebrand, with our new logomark representing an outwardly extending set of functional pillars from our subscription billing core. Our mark provides room for future expansion as the RGM platform evolves while remaining grounded in the central subscription record.

How are we promoting this rebrand?

We opted not to spend heavily on a major splash for this rebrand. These are challenging times for the tech industry, and instead, we would rather invest in iterative product improvements while still achieving our goals for a future-ready design aesthetic.

In the coming months, you can expect to see our new branding permeate across social media, our websites, industry events, and marketing campaigns. And you can also expect to see ongoing design evolution based on user feedback and industry response.

“Our transformation into a Revenue Growth Management company is a distillation of everything that the Chargebee team has been working towards, and we are excited that it represents the larger set of problems on a wider canvas that we can now solve for our customers,” reflected Krish.

We would like to thank our customers, partners, investors, and advisors who have supported Chargebee in our growth and trusted us with theirs. You can always be assured that every decision we make is around supporting your growth.