How Spotzer Launched D2C Subscriptions in 6 Weeks and Migrated 9,000 Customers with Chargebee

After more than a decade of channel-only sales, Spotzer expanded its business model by adding a direct-to-customer (D2C) channel. In just six weeks, the company stood up secure billing and migrated 9,000 customers, achieving speed to market, financial rigor, and a centralized product catalog without building billing in-house.

Challenge

Shifting to D2C without billing infrastructure

For over ten years, Spotzer, headquartered in Amsterdam, has provided white-label digital marketing solutions to SMBs through strategic channel partnerships. This model fueled growth but meant Spotzer had never needed to run its own billing infrastructure.

The turning point came in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, when a major telco decided to scale back its involvement and invited Spotzer to take over the direct end-customer relationship. For Spotzer, this created both opportunity and urgency: add a D2C channel quickly, without any billing systems in place.

“We didn’t have anything for direct billing: payments, invoicing, rev-rec, dunning, contracts. We had to move very fast.” — Matt Christian, CTO, Spotzer

Solution

Building a D2C billing foundation in 6 weeks

Spotzer considered building billing internally but quickly ruled it out. A six-week deadline to go live left no room to replicate the depth of functionality required: smart dunning, revenue recognition, secure checkout, and regional compliance.

Chargebee offered the fastest and most reliable path forward:

• Speed to market: A launch timeline measured in weeks, not months.

• Depth of capability: Out-of-the-box dunning, revenue recognition, quotes, and invoicing.

• Security and compliance: Sensitive flows like card vaulting are handled by a proven platform.

• Lower total cost of ownership: Engineering and finance are freed from ongoing billing overhead.

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“You’re not going to reinvent the wheel against a market leader. We needed best-practice features immediately and the confidence that it’s secure and reliable.” — Matt Christian, CTO

With Chargebee, Spotzer implemented its billing foundation in just weeks. The initial stack included hosted checkout, invoicing, automated dunning, and revenue recognition. Payments were localized with Braintree in Australia and Mollie in Europe.

Equally important was catalog governance. Instead of managing SKUs in scattered spreadsheets and Salesforce records, Spotzer centralized pricing and offers in Chargebee as its system of record. The team also enabled quoting with Chargebee’s legacy model to accelerate launch, with a clear roadmap to CPQ as volumes grow.

For customers, the migration was designed to be seamless, with a branded checkout, secure payment capture, and clear invoices, which gave thousands of APAC customers confidence in the transition.

Results

Migrating 9,000 customers in 5 months and unlocking margin growth

Spotzer launched its first D2C brand in six weeks, navigating new banking and gateway setups. Within five months, the company had migrated around 9,000 end customers from a channel partner to direct billing relationships —a transition made possible only with Chargebee. A European rollout is already underway.

From day one, revenue recognition was automated, eliminating the need for manual reconciliation and reducing audit risk. Payment declines and retries were managed by Chargebee’s dunning engine, freeing finance from manual collections. With the product catalog centralized, Spotzer gained a single source of truth for pricing and offers, reducing errors and internal friction.

The new D2C model created three key advantages:

• Visibility and retention: Direct billing relationships provided insights into churn and retention signals that were previously hidden behind partners.

• Margin potential: D2C cohorts are projected to deliver 25–30% higher margins compared with channel-only revenue.

• Focus on growth: Engineering and product teams were able to prioritize innovation rather than maintaining billing infrastructure.

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“Chargebee let us focus on the product and customer journey, not back-end complexity. We just need to know it works, and it does.” — Matt Christian, CTO

What other subscription businesses can learn from Spotzer’s D2C launch

• Treat billing as critical infrastructure; set it up correctly from the start.

• Keep quoting simple to unlock early sales motions, then scale into CPQ as demand grows.

• Centralize the catalog to prevent conflicting SKUs and rogue price lists.

The Big Picture: From channel-only to hybrid growth

By adding a D2C channel, Spotzer moved from channel-only sales to a hybrid model built for growth. Chargebee provided the foundation that made this shift possible, enabling Spotzer to take ownership of customer relationships, migrate 9,000 accounts, and gain the flexibility to expand into new regions and pricing strategies. What began as a partner-driven necessity has become a scalable growth strategy.

Turn channel complexity into scalable growth—just like Spotzer did.