From startup to IPO: How Recurly supports global growth for brands like Paramount+ and BARK
From the beginning, Recurly has helped its customers make sound strategy decisions, forecast financial performance, close books on time, and ensure financial accuracy. For more than a decade, we have worked with category-defining brands like Paramount+, BARK, Sprout Social, and Sling TV to grow their businesses successfully.
As a leading subscription management and recurring billing service, Recurly’s robust architecture supports and enables subscription businesses by streamlining complex subscription management and recurring billing processes, including revenue recognition. Learn more about how we accomplished this—through real customer stories that highlight specific Recurly benefits—and how we continue to invest in our business for our customers.
How Recurly helps subscription businesses scale and prepare for IPO
When it comes to business growth to IPO, supporting subscription businesses throughout the full journey is key. With this in mind, the Recurly platform was created as a cloud-native, multi-tenant SaaS solution, which uniquely meets the demands of direct-to-consumer subscriptions—a platform that hosts the most powerful solution subscription businesses could ever need. From the moment you integrate with Recurly to the first need for expansive scale and beyond, robust features and processes include:
Integrations and APIs: We know proprietary and third-party business applications play critical roles in the day-to-day seamless business operations. From turnkey hosted pages for account management and payments to tailored syncs through our robust APIs, it’s easy to integrate with our platform. Moreover, Recurly is built to be customizable, so you don’t have to cater your unique business requirements and processes to us. Our scalable and fully customizable APIs and two-way syncing expedite efficiencies so we work smarter, not harder. Our technology has world-class security and compliance, so data sharing is fast, secure, and accurate.
Global expansion capabilities: From multi-currency payments and operational costs to subscribers all around the world, you can expand into new markets confidently with Recurly. Localized subscription features allow you to process payments in the right language, currency, billing formats, and more, while our expertise means you’re backed by compliance functionality to honor local regulations.
Financial accuracy and expertise: Automation is key when it comes to revenue management, especially revenue recognition with ASC-606 and IFRS-15 standards. With revenue reporting standards changing constantly, Recurly’s global revenue recognition and forecasting allow you to streamline and automate compliance, which frees you to focus on growth. With less audit risk and costs from eliminating manual processes, you can report and forecast revenue accurately and close your books faster. Learn more about our revenue recognition solution.
Security and compliance standards: Our security is at work 24/7/365 to protect you and your customers’ data—in fact, Recurly is PCI-DSS Level 1 compliant. Configurable user access controls abide by compliance standards and best practices so data access is guarded while remaining accessible to those who need it. Our network security infrastructures have built-in compliance with global mandates so you can run your business successfully.
Reporting and analytics: With Recurly’s interactive analytics dashboards and subscription reporting, you can confidently make smarter business decisions. From plan performance and churn rates to campaign results and financial forecasts, you have access to metrics that matter. Dive deeper into subscriber acquisition and retention insights by creating unique dashboards and reports chock-full of data and APIs that reveal what you want.
This is just a preview of everything Recurly has to support your aggressive global growth and expansion plans. Learn more about Recurly's subscription management and recurring billing platform.
Real Recurly customer stories
Learn about our customers—some of who have been with us since the start—and how we’ve helped them grow.
Twitch
Four years after choosing Recurly to be its subscription management and recurring billing service in 2010, Twitch was acquired by Amazon for almost $1 billion. Recurly helped Twitch shift its resources away from payments to improve performance in other facets of the business. “When we built a similar system from scratch directly through one of the gateways… we expended probably 100 hours for every hour that it took to do the equivalent with Recurly, and the result wasn't as clean,” says Twitch. Read our Twitch case study.
BARK
In 2021, BARK went public via a Special Purpose Acquisition Company merger with Northern Star. BARK has been with Recurly since 2011 and launched Barkbox just a year later. With Recurly, BARK has been able to “focus on the elements that are core to [the] business–the customer experience and the box.” Read more about Barkbox’s experience with Recurly.
Read more customer stories here.
Grow faster, smarter, and stronger with Recurly
For reliable, recurring revenue, more and more businesses are turning to subscriptions. And as the subscription industry continues to mature, it’s more important than ever to invest in the right subscription management and billing technology. Every customer of Recurly benefits from our unique capabilities grounded in flexibility, scalability, and extensibility. In fact, we support over 55 million active monthly subscribers and process $10 billion in payment volume annually, with 98% customer retention five years in a row.
If there’s one thing we learned from our annual State of Subscriptions report, it’s that subscriptions aren’t going anywhere and, instead, they continue to become more and more popular among consumers and businesses alike. Partner with a subscription management and recurring billing platform like Recurly and scale your business beyond limits.