The Dodo Digest: The Developer Stack Got Smarter This Year

Happy Holidays from Dodo Payments!

It couldn’t have been a more productive year for me and Dodo Payments.
I’m right now away from the office (I love taking these short breaks) but I wanted to share this newsletter which is a take on all significant highlights from our phenomenal 2025 that have impacted you directly.

So I’d suggest you grab a nice cup of coffee or hot cocoa (no extra points for guessing which part of the world I’m in) and dig in!

2025 was an absolutely breathtaking year for Dodo Payments. Since we launched publically in Feb, we have had 47 major releases.

Highlights

1/ Built a truly global platform with payment collection from 220+ regions in 80 currencies with 30+ Payment Methods including cards, UPI, PayPal - all powered by our inhouse orchestrator

2/ Developed a powerful flexible billing engine with Usage, Credits, Subscription, Entitlements that make monetisation effortless. We got our our PCI L1 compliance to power our recurring payments

3/ Established new benchmarks in Developer Experience with 100+ plugins, adapters, integrations across tech stats. The highlight thought wa Sentra, our AI agent that integrates billing & payments in 2 prompts.

December was an excellent month with Dodo Payments breaking all time highs across all metrics.

This month, we're seeing something interesting: while AI bubble debates dominate headlines, the real infrastructure upgrades are happening quietly. Two releases in early December Mistral's Devstral 2 and Cohere's Rerank 4 perfectly illustrate the AI automation wave we're building on with Sentra. Let's dive in.

Mistral Devstral 2: Coding Automation Gets Real

Released December 9th, Devstral 2 is a 123B parameter coding model that achieves 72.2% on SWE-bench Verified while being 7x more cost-efficient than Claude Sonnet. The killer feature? Mistral Vibe CLI a terminal-native assistant that orchestrates multi-file changes through natural language prompts.

Key highlights:

• 256K context window for project-level understanding

• Devstral Small 2 (24B) runs locally on laptops

• Open-weight with Apache 2.0 licensing

Cohere Rerank 4: Enterprise Search Gets Precision

Two days later on December 11th, Cohere launched Rerank 4 with a 32K context window (4x increase) and self-learning capabilities. This matters for AI agents; better retrieval means fewer retries, lower costs, and more reliable outputs.

What's new:

• Cross-encoder architecture for semantic precision

• First self-learning reranker (remembers preferences)

• 100+ languages with state-of-the-art retrieval

The Common Thread

Both releases solve the same core problem: automating complex developer tasks that used to take weeks. Devstral 2 automates coding. Rerank 4 automates accurate retrieval. This is the same pattern we apply to billing with Sentra.

Sentra: The Same Pattern, Applied to monetization

Just like Devstral's Vibe CLI lives in your terminal and Rerank 4 improves your search stack, Sentra lives in your IDE (VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf) and handles billing integration through natural language prompts.

From 2-4 weeks of integration work → 15 minutes

How Sentra Works

• Describe your billing model: Subscriptions, usage-based, credits, tokens, or hybrid

• Sentra generates code: SDK integration, webhooks, subscription flows all auto-generated

• Deploy and go live: Start collecting payments across 220+ countries

The Dodo Payments Platform

Sentra is powered by our complete monetization engine:

• Merchant of Record: We handle tax, VAT, GST across 220+ countries

• Global payments: 80+ currencies, 30+ methods (UPI, iDEAL, Klarna, Apple Pay)

• Developer SDKs: TypeScript, Python, Go, PHP, Java, plus Next.js, SvelteKit adapters

• Quick migration: One command to migrate from Stripe, LemonSqueezy, Paddle

Traditional Setup vs Sentra

Trusted by 25,000+ Builders

Try Sentra Today

Sign up at app.dodopayments.com and install the Sentra extension for your IDE. Learn more at dodopayments.com/sentra

December 2025 is showing us what practical AI looks like: tools that eliminate friction, reduce costs, and actually ship. Whether it's coding with Devstral 2, searching with Rerank 4, or billing with Sentra the pattern is the same. Infrastructure that works.

Changelog - v1.70.0

• Inline Checkout (BETA) - Embed Dodo Payments checkout directly into your website for fully integrated, branded payment experiences. Unlike overlay checkout, inline checkout embeds the payment form directly into your page layout with real-time breakdown events, custom order summaries, and complete control over checkout design while Dodo handles PCI compliance.

• Use Existing Payment Methods - Create payments, subscriptions, and checkout sessions using saved payment methods with the new payment_method_id parameter. Enable one-click purchases, faster checkouts for returning customers, and improved conversion rates by skipping payment method collection.

• Subscription Plan Management in Dashboard - Change subscription plans and update next billing dates directly from the dashboard in a single action. Includes proration options, visual preview of billing changes, and complete control over subscription adjustments without API calls.

• Short Links for Payment URLs - Generate cleaner, more shareable payment links with custom slugs. Professional-looking shortened URLs perfect for SMS, email, or social media that build customer confidence and improve trust.

• redirect_immediately Flag - Skip the default payment success page and redirect customers immediately after payment completion. Ideal for custom success pages, mobile optimization, and seamless embedded checkout flows.

• On-Demand Subscriptions for All - Usage-based billing now available for all businesses. Create subscriptions and charge customers based on actual usage with flexible billing cycles, perfect for API usage, storage, compute time, and other metered services.

• General Bug Fixes and Enhancements - Performance improvements, UI polish, and minor bug fixes for a more reliable experience.

Check out the complete Documentation here: https://docs.dodopayments.com/changelog/v1.70.0

That’s all for today.

Take a minute to explore the latest updates we’ve shipped and how they can strengthen your current payment model.

If you hit friction or want clarity on usage, tiers, or credits,
join our Discord community and ask anything - product, pricing, edge-cases.

Join our loving Discord community : https://discord.com/invite/dodo-payments-1305511580854779984

Until then,
Rishabh Goel
Co-Founder, Dodo Payments.