How Bark Transformed Complex Subscription Management from Engineering Bottleneck to Business Accelerator

Bark's new CEO arrived in mid-2024 with an ambitious mandate: pivot the company's future monetization strategy around subscription models. What seemed like a straightforward business directive quickly revealed a complex technical challenge that threatened to derail the entire initiative.

The company's existing subscription infrastructure, built directly on Stripe, had served it well during its bootstrapped growth phase. However, as Bark scaled across 1,000+ service categories and nine international markets, the limitations became impossible to ignore.

The challenges were multifaceted and interconnected. Operating across diverse markets meant managing thousands of potential pricing combinations, with different service categories requiring unique structures that varied by country. The complexity became exponential when the business wanted to layer on tiered subscriptions and usage-based add-ons and retain the ability to price on a granular level.

Every pricing change or new subscription feature demanded considerable development effort. The engineering team was trapped in a cycle of maintaining payment infrastructure instead of building the core product features that would drive growth. Meanwhile, its self-built revenue recovery system was struggling under the weight of manual processes that couldn't scale with its international expansion ambitions.

"We needed to lock down pricing based on multiple drivers, category, country, subscription tier, and usage-based add-ons," explains Joonas Kukkonen, CTO at Bark. "The complexity was becoming a huge problem. We needed a system that allowed our business to take control of pricing rather than it being an engineering problem."

The timeline pressure made the situation more acute. With a January 2025 launch target, the team had months to evaluate, implement, and deploy a solution capable of handling its complex requirements.

After an extensive evaluation of multiple platforms, Bark selected Chargebee based on three critical factors: its flexibility in handling complex pricing models, speed of implementation, and ability to scale with its business transformation. Kukkonen says, “Chargebee's flexible data model was the key deciding factor for us." Rather than attempting a wholesale migration, Bark implemented a strategic phased approach that began with subscription products while maintaining existing credit-based payments on the legacy system.

The implementation required more than technical integration; it demanded a mindset shift in how Bark approached subscription architecture. Working closely with Chargebee's solution architects, the team reconceptualized its entire system. Instead of traditional subscription models, it adopted a composable approach using plans as containers with add-ons and differential pricing objects. This architectural change unlocked possibilities that seemed impossible under its previous constraints.

Perhaps most importantly, the platform enabled business teams to manage pricing and product configurations without engineering intervention. This shift dramatically reduced time-to-market for new offerings and freed technical resources for core product development.

"Both options, continuing with Chargebee or hacking around our existing system, were about as quick to implement," Kukkonen notes. "But using Chargebee, we chose the proper solution that we could later scale, add on, and improve, rather than a completely dead-end codebase."

The transformation delivered immediate benefits while setting Bark up for faster growth. Pricing features that were too complex to even consider building in the legacy stack became feasible to implement. Many features were also much faster to ship with out-of-the-box Chargebee solutions. Just for revenue recovery, the implementation that would have required six weeks of engineering effort was completed in one week, representing a significant time savings that the team could redirect toward core product development. More importantly, the engineering team no longer manages subscription infrastructure, allowing complete focus on product innovation and business transformation initiatives.

From a revenue perspective, Chargebee's retention capabilities achieved a save rate of 12%, improving Bark’s success rate by 224% in just 30 days, performing better than its previous self-built solution. The real value came from eliminating the ongoing engineering effort required to maintain and improve their custom system. Customer support teams can now handle subscription migrations and management tasks that previously needed engineering scripts and manual intervention.

The operational transformation extended across Bark’s international footprint. Centralized billing across nine international markets with country and category-specific pricing capabilities eliminated the need for thousands of individual plans and add-ons. Chargebee’s differential pricing feature allows the separation of subscription plan configuration and pricing to be independent entities. In addition, Chargebee automatically handles compliance with regional requirements, including one-click cancellation mandates, without additional development effort.

The strategic impact goes beyond operational efficiency. Bark now approaches monetization decisions with a fundamentally different mindset, asking "What can we do?" instead of "Can we do this?" when considering new strategies. New subscription tiers and add-on products can be configured and launched within weeks rather than quarters, enabling rapid experimentation and market response.

Looking forward, Chargebee supports Bark's strategy of rolling out its new subscription model across different markets in stages. Integrated support for multiple payment gateways positions them for expansion into markets requiring local payment methods, while the flexible architecture accommodates increasingly sophisticated monetization strategies that would have been prohibitive under its previous system.

With the foundational infrastructure in place, Bark is leveraging Chargebee to support increasingly sophisticated monetization strategies. The platform's flexibility allows it to test complex bundling scenarios and pricing experiments that would have been prohibitive under its previous system.

"We're building quite a complex new subscription setup next, rolling it out market by market in stages," Kukkonen explains. "Due to the complexity around packaging, having Chargebee dramatically improves our time to market and time to value for new monetization strategies."

The success extends beyond technical implementation. By removing subscription management as an engineering constraint, Bark has radically changed how it approaches product development and market expansion. The company can now respond to market opportunities and customer feedback with the agility its growth stage demands.

Key Metrics:

• Implementation Time: 1 week vs. 6+ weeks for custom build. This efficiency applies to every major feature: revenue recovery, checkout, subscription management, and beyond

• Revenue Recovery Rate: 27.8% success rate with automated dunning

• Market Coverage: 9+ countries with centralized management

• Engineering Resource Savings: 6 months of development time redirected to core product

Bark's journey demonstrates that a proper subscription billing and monetization platform can transform operational constraints into competitive advantages. The key question becomes how quickly you can implement a solution that grows with your ambitions.

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