Breaking the Language Barrier: Phrase’s Blueprint for Efficiency

Phrase is one of the world's most powerful, connective, and customizable localization platforms. As a leader in AI-led translation technology, it empowers businesses of all sizes, from startups to industry titans like Snowflake, Zendesk, Uber, and Shopify. With a diverse team of over 300 employees, Phrase serves a global customer base exceeding 200,000 users.

The Challenge: Untangling Growth Bottlenecks

As the success of Phrase grew, it faced challenges with its existing revenue tech stack. Until 2020, the company relied on homegrown billing and provisioning systems, which led to operational inefficiencies. When Martin Konop stepped into the role of CFO in 2020, he sought to modernize Phrase's subscription model and billing tech stack and identified a few key areas:

• Manual billing operations: The finance team managed repetitive tasks and the absence of a unified data source limited visibility into business performance and growth potential.

• Subscription management impacting growth plans: Phrase's leadership had ambitious growth strategies, including product diversification, shifting to usage-based pricing, and expanding via acquisitions. The existing subscription management approach wasn't designed to handle these requirements at scale.

• Fragmented customer experience: "Our product vision is to offer an end-to-end solution through a unified platform, but our initial subscription structure didn't align with this vision. Multi-product customers had separate subscriptions, invoices, and renewal dates, leading to a fragmented customer experience," said Martin.

The Solution: Rewriting the Growth Playbook

After careful consideration, Phrase partnered with Chargebee to upgrade its subscription management. Within six weeks, Chargebee was fully integrated into Phrase's financial operations to meet its requirements:

• Automated billing, renewals, and recurring payments

• Streamlined subscription proration and mid-cycle changes

• Integration with its CRM (Salesforce) and ERP (NetSuite) systems

• A scalable platform to support both immediate needs and long-term goals

Phrase’s key growth drivers include:

• Organic and M&A growth: Phrase was acquired by Memsource in 2021, and in 2022, both brands merged under the single identity of Phrase. This unification streamlined product offerings and centralized business and financial operations. Subsequently, in 2023, billing was centralized through Chargebee's Multi-Business Entity feature. “Phrase aims to grow organically and via strategic acquisitions that help expand our platform capabilities. We use Chargebee to maintain centralized billing across multiple entities. This has greatly improved scalability and efficiency, saving our billing team valuable time," said Martin.

• Global market expansion: With a solid product-market fit and a focus on the enterprise market, Phrase widened its subscriber base to new segments and regions. Phrase initiated the following actions to drive its international expansion plans:

  • Adopted localized pricing with multi-currency support

  • Offered diverse, local payment options via PayPal and Stripe integrations

  • Automated US sales tax through the Avalara integration

  • Unified its global billing operations with Multi-Business Entity

• Product-to-platform transition: Phrase differentiated itself by evolving from a suite of point solutions to the comprehensive Phrase Localization Platform that can scale as a business grows. It centralized feature provisioning and entitlements, closing gaps in the subscriber experience. It started providing a holistic end-to-end solution that caters to the needs of its diverse customers with an appropriate pricing and packaging model.

Chargebee Entitlements allowed us to activate multiple products with a single subscription. Our customers now have a unified subscription, single invoice, and coordinated renewal process. This transition has been a game-changer for us!

Martin Konop, Group CFO, Phrase

• Pricing and packaging innovation: Phrase achieved predictable revenue growth balanced with customer-centricity by shifting from a seat-based to a hybrid monetization model (fixed plus consumption-based charges).

  ---

  "Our primary goal with the shift to usage-based pricing was to allow customers to scale without limitations. With Chargebee Entitlements, we have a centralized, scalable approach to feature provisioning and packaging. This is essential for meeting customer expectations in a usage-based pricing model,” said Martin.

  ---

  With this shift to usage-based pricing, Phrase unlocked the much-needed agility for pricing and packaging experimentation and reduced developer dependency.

Explore our blog post on Phrase's journey to usage-based pricing for more insights.

The Results: Streamlined Operations and Integrated Billing Tech Stack Drive Efficiency

• Improved operational efficiency: Under Martin’s leadership, Phrase has grown its revenue while maintaining an impressive Net Retention Rate (NRR) and keeping its billing operations team constant at 2.0 FTE. This success is driven by streamlining finance operations and adapting cutting-edge localization technology to customer needs. Additionally, experimenting with pricing and packaging, and transitioning from a homegrown billing system to a modern revenue stack.

  ---

• Integrated stack across entities: "Our integrated tech stack is a big boost in ensuring the success of our acquisitions. We sync relevant Chargebee platform and subscription data with Salesforce and NetSuite for automated quote-to-cash operations. We also integrate with Avalara, Stripe, PayPal, Snowflake, and Slack to provide consistent and contextual revenue data to our global teams," added Martin.

  ---

• Empowered engineering team: By entrusting Chargebee with billing and entitlement management, Phrase's engineering team can now focus on core product development.

  ---

💡 Discover expert tips: In an exclusive webinar with Chargebee, Martin, Phrase's CFO, and Michal Petřík, Phrase's Tech Lead, shared their experiences on unlocking efficiency at scale through centralized feature provisioning and entitlements. Watch the webinar now to learn more!

Phrase continues to break down language barriers, translating not just words but opportunities into tangible success. With Chargebee as its trusted ally, Phrase is well-positioned to write the next chapter of the growth story in any language it chooses.

Ready to harness the power of subscription billing and management to drive revenue growth for your subscription business? Get a demo