Why the Subscription Business Is No Longer About Content

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The subscription economy is built atop a fundamental tension: When does more revenue become more churn?

The question is gaining relevance amid a wave of price increases, and it signals that the classic flat monthly fee model is breaking down.

To learn more about why recurring billing is becoming a core operating layer for subscription platforms, PYMNTS sat down with Jake Lambrecht, director of partnerships and platforms at Nuvei; Ken Houseman, vice president of order to cash at Zuora; and Patrick Presto, head of payments at Vimeo.

Ultimately, the three leaders stressed that subscriptions are no longer a promise of access but a negotiated and ongoing exchange of value.

Upsell and repricing campaigns can become a “slippery slope” if they’re untethered from real customer value, Zuora’s Houseman said.

“The most important thing is understanding the value that you’re delivering for the subscription,” he said, adding that the value proposition has to connect “to the individual themselves” and cannot remain generic.

It’s against this backdrop that recurring billing is being redefined by data-driven personalization, payments as a strategic lever, and flexible orchestration. Payments are no longer an endpoint; they’re becoming a decision engine.

“If used correctly, payments can actually be an intelligence layer on how a SaaS business can dial in on making the product sell more consistently, be successful and predictable,” Vimeo’s Presto said.

The Evolution of Value-Metered Relationships

For much of its history, recurring billing was treated as plumbing. As long as invoices went out on time and payments cleared, few executives paid close attention. That era is coming to a close.

“Blanket” subscription logic is ending because data now makes it possible to treat subscriptions as living relationships rather than static contracts, Houseman said. AI-driven products, cloud infrastructure and digital services with real marginal costs have forced companies to rethink pricing.

Zuora’s own acquisition of Zephr and Sub(x), for example, was designed to tighten that loop by connecting product usage triggers to payment behaviors, he said. That includes everything from how customers consume a digital product to whether they update payment methods, fall behind or recover.

In that framing, the subscription business isn’t just selling access; it is continually renegotiating the perceived exchange between value delivered and cash collected. The systems that support that renegotiation, such as packaging catalogs, discounting logic, dunning and payment method management, must be flexible enough to act on signals in near real time.

Turning Payments Into a Growth System

The shift reflects a deeper recalibration. Pricing is moving closer to consumption, and consumption is becoming measurable in near real time. As a result, recurring billing is no longer just about charging regularly; it’s about continuously aligning price with perceived value.

Billing and payments systems don’t just serve internal finance teams anymore. They increasingly serve ecosystems where “customers” have different levels of sophistication, different sensitivities to churn, and different abilities to respond to billing events, Presto said.

This model can widen revenue opportunities, but it also puts stress on billing operations, forecasting and payment acceptance because variability makes the shape of recurring payments less predictable to issuers, networks and risk systems.

“Complex billing models can affect growth in a lot of different ways,” Lambrecht said. “In recurring billing, even a 1% to 2% lift in approval rates can materially impact forecasted cash flow and overall forecasted revenue.”

The Rise of Outcome-Based Orchestration

As complexity increases, many companies have discovered that rigid, rule-based systems don’t scale. Hard-coded routing logic can break down when conditions change. A more adaptive approach, outcome-based orchestration, is emerging.

The goal is performance at scale, not simply throughput, Lambrecht said.

Nuvei uses “targeted routing logic” to ensure transactions follow “the most optimal path,” he said.

For subscription businesses, the value of optimization is amplified by compounding. Small improvements in authorization rates become outsized revenue impacts as they repeat monthly across a base.

In practice, that means enabling flexibility. Merchants shouldn’t be forced into rigid multiyear gateway contracts or volume commitments just to secure performance and pricing, Houseman said. Zuora’s platform is meant to make payment operations “plug and play,” allowing merchants to allocate volume to the partners that deliver the best performance and support.

Digital Commerce Is Global by Default

Orchestration becomes even more important in a world where every internet business is now global by default, even those that don’t plan to be.

Customers sign up from regions where cards are not the dominant payment method. Governments introduce regulations that can abruptly disrupt recurring billing flows.

Regulatory changes or mandated payment rails can hit “overnight,” Presto said, adding he experienced this with India’s regulatory environment and as markets like Brazil formalize new payment behaviors. Payments become a rapid response function as much as a steady-state optimization problem.

He described the key role today “as a conductor,” aiming for payments to be “invisible behind the scenes … so that things just work,” even while the underlying stack is evolving market by market.

Lambrecht described the “data handshake” required to make this work across platforms. Real-time issuer responses and transaction history inform retry timing and frequency, and integration ensures that “when a payment fails, each platform is immediately aware.”

The result is that recovery actions match the billing lifecycle, and routing can be tuned to priorities such as “lowest cost,” “fastest settlement” or “highest approval rate,” he said.

The three panelists’ answer for “one mistake to avoid” was stop treating payments as an afterthought.

“Payments is not a back-office chore; it is a growth accelerator,” Houseman said, adding that the right payment method “at every step of the life cycle” is critical.

Lambrecht warned against overcomplicating the payment flow with too much choice, since excess options can create “unnecessary friction.”

Presto took the caution inward, saying companies must simplify internal language so teams align on what they’re optimizing, such as collection rate, paid subscribers or approval rates, rather than talking past each other.