Serving 500K+ Active Users across 180 countries: The ‘Brevo’ Phenomenon

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is the leading digital marketing platform that enables businesses with powerful tools for CRM, Email Campaigns, Live Chat, Marketing Automation, and more. Headquartered in Paris with offices in Seattle, Berlin, Sofia, Noida, Toronto, and Bangalore, Brevo serves more than 500,000 active users across 180 countries, a remarkable feat within a decade of its inception.

Brevo empowers SMBs to stand tall, prepare for takeoff, and compete with the more prominent players. Though the product has evolved to support large organizations such as Amnesty International and Carrefour, Brevo continues to serve SMBs, staying true to its mission of democratizing marketing technology to all businesses.

The Problem

Brevo's obsession with understanding, delighting, and serving SMBs is the bedrock of its success. The team is always ready to take up newer, bigger growth opportunities — visible from their expansion to newer markets and six major acquisitions between 2019 and 2022.

Growth begets complexity, and there are no two ways about it. Every phase of Brevo's growth brought corresponding subscription management challenges to their finance team. Serving SMBs & large enterprises meant solving for both self-serve and sales-driven subscription models; expanding to new regions meant newer languages, currencies, and price points to deal with. To top it off, the historic rise of digitalization among SMBs caused by the tailwinds of the global pandemic and its recent acquisitions pushed the gas further on its hypergrowth journey.

Their in-house legacy billing system could only keep up with this pace for so long. Besides not being able to scale, it couldn’t provide visibility on the payment status of customer subscriptions, which directly impacts the bottom line.

“Supporting the business growth and structuring our internal systems and processes go hand in hand because we cannot sustain growth if our systems don’t scale. When we realized the limitations of our legacy billing system impacted our principal growth lever — our customers’ payment renewals — we knew a change was imminent,” said Edouard Celier, CFO, Brevo.

The Solution

After a thorough evaluation of subscription management vendors, Brevo chose Chargebee. “We found Chargebee can truly empower companies like us in their growth and international expansion strategy. That’s the major reason we partnered with Chargebee, and we are glad we made that choice,” said Edouard.

Here’s how Chargebee fuels Brevo's billing and payment collection ecosystem:

• Simplified product catalog: Brevo houses its diverse product portfolio and range of pay-as-you-go pricing tiers using Chargebee’s Product Catalog.

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What started as three simple pricing tiers expanded as we introduced customized plans and went through 3-4 price revisions. And since we bill in 15+ currencies, we have to factor that too, even for a minor price change. It’s a relief that Chargebee’s Product Catalog helps manage this without complicating the catalog management.

Neeraj Bachpai, Product Manager, Brevo

• Streamlined payment collection and reconciliation: Chargebee’s native integrations with Adyen, GoCardless, and PayPal enable Brevo to collect online payments through diverse payment modes and close the invoices automatically. The offline payments collected through wire transfers are recorded by their team in Chargebee, enabling faster and more accurate payment reconciliation.

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• Localization to a T: Brevo’s platform is available in 6 languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Portuguese. Through Chargebee’s out-of-the-box support for all these, Brevo communicates with its customers in their preferred language — on transactional documents like invoices, checkout pages, or self-serve portal.

The Impact

• Multiple teams, one system of record: Having Chargebee as the single system of record helps Edouard provide better visibility into subscription data to Brevo’s globally distributed finance teams spread across Europe and the US. It also enables its customer-facing teams to access subscription information and offer timely assistance to customers quickly.

• A perpetual ‘Plan B’ for payment failures: Chargebee’s Dunning mechanism initiates payment retries for failed payments and notifies Brevo’s customers automatically. This optimizes their renewal workflows and ensures no money is left on the table.

• Increased operational efficiency: “Chargebee’s recurring revenue workflows help us automate our billing processes and stay on top of the increasingly complex market standards and regulatory compliances such as the UK and EU VAT,” added Edouard.