Dodo Payments 2025:what we built, why it mattered, and what’s coming in 2026
Ayush Agarwal
Co-founder & CPTO
Jan 5, 2026
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5
min
If 2025 taught us one thing, it’s this: building great payments tech is more than moving money. It’s about building trust, solving complex billing problems for developers, and creating a community that helps each other ship faster.
At Dodo Payments we treated last year like a sprint and a lab rolled into one — shipping features, scaling globally, and learning loudly from our users. Below is a run-through of what we achieved in 2025 and what we’ve packed into the roadmap for 2026.
The year that changed our scale and scope
2025 was a breakout year in a few clear ways:
Our global community expanded across six continents, a real, active community of 3.5K builders exchanging ideas and feedback.
We hit Product Hunt and climbed to #2 Product of the Day, which put our tools in front of thousands of builders overnight.
We connected with 43K+ professionals on LinkedIn and became the Merchant of Record of choice for many developer-first businesses.
On the product side we shipped billing and payments capabilities shaped explicitly for AI-native builders and platform businesses.
Community first: what we built and why it matters
We doubled down on community because developers build differently when they’re part of a network:
A global, active community (3.5K builders) where folks share code snippets, adapters, and debugging tips.
Public discussions and OSS contributions around our Billing SDK, making it easier for teams to customize and extend billing logic.
Product Hunt visibility that turned casual visitors into power users and contributors.
Why put so much energy here? Because payment flows stay complicated: regional compliance, tax rules, currency conversions, usage-based pricing, the best solutions come when developers teach each other how to handle real edge cases. Community accelerates that knowledge transfer.
Payments & billing: actual capabilities that customers used
In 2025 we focused on the real plumbing, the billing and payments features that remove manual work and friction:
Billing built for AI-native builders
AI Agent Sentra: Sentra is our intelligent automation to handle complex billing scenarios, reduce human errors, and automate reconciliation workflows.
Support for usage, credits & subscription models: you can mix usage-based charges, prepaid credits, and recurring subscriptions without awkward workarounds.
Billing SDK (OSS): fast, well-documented SDKs and adapters so devs can get running quickly and customize logic when needed.
100+ integrations: plugins, adaptors, and connectors to common CRMs, analytics tools, and fulfillment systems.
Payments without borders
Multi-currency domestic processing in USD, EUR, GBP, and INR with seamless conversions.
Coverage for 220+ regions and 80+ currencies, ensuring users can pay in local currencies almost anywhere.
Bank-grade security: we achieved PCI DSS Level 1 certification, the industry’s highest standard.
40+ payment methods including regionals like UPI, global favorites like PayPal, and fast paths to collect the very first payment in under 5 minutes.
These features were used by customers to launch new product lines, accept payments from new markets, and reduce time spent on billing support.
Beyond core payments: new verticals and platform features
Last year we also proved that our infrastructure can power different businesses:
Dodo Games: a gaming vertical that unlocked new monetization patterns and proved our billing system can handle frequent microtransactions and complex promotional rules.
Index by Dodo Payments: a discovery tool helping developers find the SDKs, adapters, and community guidance they need.
Enterprise-grade DDOS protection and availability improvements so uptime never gets in the way of growth.
These moves show the platform is flexible: it supports standard SaaS subscriptions, usage-heavy APIs, marketplaces, and high-frequency gaming micro-payments.
What’s in store for 2026:
We’re not hitting the brakes. For 2026 we set goals that prioritize flexibility, global reach, and an even better developer experience.
More flexibility in billing
Credit-Based Billing: a new model that lets businesses sell credits (perfect for AI, API, and platform businesses), combine prepaid and postpaid models, and offer complex promos without heavy engineering.
Deeper billing models: tiered pricing, volume discounts, prepaid credits, and hybrid models because one-size-fits-all rarely fits modern business models.
Dunning & churn recovery: smarter automated recovery flows that reduce involuntary churn without blasting customers with generic emails.
Payments: deeper and wider
New payment rails: we’ll add Pix (Brazil), Blik (Europe), and USDC/USDT rails to bring stablecoin settlements into normal merchant flows plus other regional favorites by request.
Expanded domestic processing: more countries will get domestic processing so your local customers pay locally (better conversion, fewer declines).
More “stables” support: making crypto settlement predictable and compliant for merchants who want it.
Developer experience: AI-powered, not AI-replacing
Smarter integrations: tools that learn from your codebase and suggest adapters, configs, or schema automatically reducing onboarding times.
More adapters & OSS projects: we’ll publish more open-source projects so the community can build alongside us.
Even better docs & SDKs: developer happiness is a KPI that means better docs, a richer test harness, and more code samples for niche use cases.
Why all of this matters to you (and your customers)
Payments and billing touch everything: conversion, retention, analytics, legal compliance. When these layers are unreliable, teams waste time on customer support, accounting reconciliation, and regional compliance. When they’re reliable, product teams can focus on features and growth.
Here’s what our customers gained in 2025:
Faster launches in new markets thanks to broader rails and local payment methods.
Less operational overhead with AI-driven billing automation.
Higher conversion from the first payment experience under 5 minutes.
A developer ecosystem that ships stable integrations and real-world examples.
And in 2026 we’re extending those wins with more billing flexibility, deeper local payment options, and tools that actually learn from your codebase.
Final thoughts: where we go from here
2025 was a year of proving product-market fit: real builders used Dodo Payments to solve hard problems, and our community helped shape the product.
For 2026 we’re doubling down on what worked community, global payments, and developer-first billing while introducing new primitives like credit-based billing and regional payment rails that matter to growth-stage platforms.
If you’re building an API-first product, an AI-native service, a marketplace, and payments are slowing you down, we built Dodo Payments for you.
