Q3 at Dodo Payments: Building Billing for the Real World
Ayush Agarwal
Co-founder & CPTO
Sep 30, 2025
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5
min
Quarter 3 at Dodo Payments was less about delivering as quickly as possible and more about building billing that actually fits how SaaS and AI businesses charge for value.
We focused on flexible monetization; usage-based billing, richer proration rules, hosted checkout, and better observability and on making it predictable and auditable for merchants.
Rather than rush solutions, we spent extra cycles refining the primitives, aggregation windows, deduplication, rounding rules, and simulation tools, so merchants could adopt flexible pricing without risking invoices that surprise customers.
If there’s one thesis for Q3: billing correctness and predictability are product features, not just engineering hygiene.
Major Releases
Usage-Based Billing (UBB)
UBB is our biggest release to date not just because of the code we wrote, but because of the product shift it enables.
Instead of forcing every product into a handful of fixed tiers, merchants can now price for actual value: API calls, active seats, or any custom metric that maps to how customers consume and realize value.
That flexibility changes the conversation founders have with customers, from which plan do you want? to how much did you use, and what does that usage mean for you?
Why it mattered: Many SaaS/AI startups are moving from blunt subscription tiers to precision pricing. Usage Based Billing unlocks that without forcing a custom build. We built metering adapters, a flexible pricing engine so merchants can preview bills before committing.
The challenge: Implementing UBB proved significantly more complex than we initially anticipated. Diverse pricing models and metering approaches exposed late events, duplicates, and negative deltas.
It took longer than planned but we prioritized doing it right over rushing it out. That decision meant investing in better tooling, deeper testing, and clearer migration paths so merchants can adopt metered pricing without risking surprise invoices or billing disputes.
Enhanced Checkout Sessions API
Our new Checkout Sessions API is a powerful, hosted checkout solution that provides a complete payment flow for both one-time purchases and subscriptions. becomes the easiest path to take a product from demo to paid.
Key benefits.
Simplified integration: you no longer need to provide a complete billing address up front, pass whatever customer info you have and we’ll collect the rest during checkout.
Enhanced customization: full control over payment methods, currencies, themes, and feature flags so the hosted flow matches your branding and local requirements.
Better UX: support for pre-filled customer information and streamlined forms to reduce friction and improve conversion.
Flexible configuration: multi-product carts, subscription trials, discount codes, saved payment methods, and more are supported out of the box.
What changed: Previously, creating payment links required complete billing address details. With Checkout Sessions, you simply pass the customer data you have, the checkout page collects the rest.
Why it mattered: A hosted checkout that supports subscriptions and metered billing reduces engineering time and lets teams iterate on conversion without reworking core flows. By centralizing best practices, merchants inherit a solid baseline implementation and get to revenue faster.
Advanced Webhooks
This quarter we treated webhooks like a first-class product and made the system comprehensive and fully self-serve in the dashboard. Merchants can now create and manage endpoints, inspect delivery logs, replay failed events, tune retry policies, and monitor endpoint health, all without opening a support ticket.
Key capabilities we added:
Endpoint & subscription management: Now, teams can spin up, pause, or retire endpoints directly, fine-tune which events flow where, and even set custom headers or rate limits per endpoint. No more brittle one-size-fits-all setup.
Security Measures: view and rotate signing secrets per endpoint, regenerate keys, and copy code snippets for signature verification. Merchants can keep integrations secure without slowing down development.
Delivery history & debugging: We’ve made every attempt transparent, request/response bodies, headers, filters, replays, so diagnosing “why didn’t that webhook fire?” is a five-minute task, not a five-hour one.
Testing & troubleshooting: Send test events from the portal using mock payloads and inspect payload schemas and expected fields before you go live.
Monitoring & metrics: delivery success/failure counts, latency, recent error trends, and an endpoint health status, so teams can spot problems before merchants do.
Why this mattered: A surprising share of integration time is spent answering “why didn’t that webhook fire?” and that work distracts engineers from product. By making webhooks observable, debuggable, and controllable in the dashboard, we turned hours of support into a click-and-retry workflow.
Subscription Proration & Discount Models
Billing is where product and finance meet. This quarter we broadened what subscriptions can express: scheduled plan changes, 100% discounts for limited periods, and graceful $0 downgrades that maintain entitlement logic without creating billing noise.
Why it mattered: Growth teams frequently run promotions, pilots, or partner deals that don’t fit neat billing patterns. By enabling scheduled changes and flexible discounting primitives, merchants can model real commercial agreements directly in their billing system.
We paid special attention to predictability: merchants can preview the net impact of a scheduled change, understand the proration lines that will appear on invoices, and avoid surprise $0 or negative line-items that used to trip up bookkeeping.
The Key benefits: Increases sales and revenue, flexible subscription change and the ability to experiment with promotions without a manual support backlog.
Adaptive Currency Expansion
We extended Dodo Payments to support additional payment contexts and tightened the logic around multi-currency subscriptions so merchants don’t have to juggle a patchwork of conversions.
Why it mattered: Receiving a payment should not introduce invoice surprises for customers or accounting headaches for finance teams.
We focused on: We focused on ensuring display-to-charge parity across currencies and included new currencies like MVR, MUR, ZAR, PHP, FJD, QAR, and MYR so users always see the price they will be billed.
The challenge: Handling rounding and conversion consistency across geographies required deep architectural work. We improved our money datatype, introduced deterministic rounding rules, and added end-to-end tests that mirror real merchant flows.
The result is cleaner cross-border behavior, fewer surprises at reconciliation, and a more consistent billing experience for international customers.
Analytics & Reporting 2.0
Billing data only becomes strategic when it’s accessible and trustworthy. Our Analytics & Reporting 2.0 surfaces cumulative revenue, retention cohorts, and other business signals in dashboards designed for fast, operational decisions with CSV exports and direct data downloads so finance and product teams can dig deeper.
Why it mattered: Founders and operators ask similar questions every week, where is revenue coming from, which cohorts are churning, which offers actually move the needle? With 2.0, the answers sit closer to the source of truth: your billing system.
The challenge: Delivering real-time insights for growing merchant volumes pushed us to optimize our data pipelines. We re-architected ingestion, improved query efficiency, and tuned freshness SLAs so dashboards load quickly and stay reliable as data scales.
The outcome: Merchants can trust the numbers they see, even at peak volume.
Multi-Language & Localization
Localization is a way products become usable and trusted across geographies. Adding Turkish this quarter was less about language and more about small cultural and operational details
Why it mattered: When customers see terms, receipts, and support prompts in their language, friction goes down. This release is foundational; it simplifies onboarding in a new market and sets the pattern for subsequent locales.
Small wins that compound (minor enhancements)
We shipped a dozen quality-of-life items that merchants told us matter: metadata export in payment reports, next-billing-date customization, unified dashboard search, license activation context support, and $0 transaction handling. These are the little things, but they reduce friction for finance teams and improve developer empathy.
What’s next: Q4 2025 & beyond
AI Agent: An AI Agent that manages your entire integration process.
Native EUR & GBP Support: Direct wallet and payout support for Euro and Pound Sterling, fewer FX hops for merchants operating in Europe and the U.K.
Iterating on UBB & Checkout: Improved customer-portal UX, additional price model types, and checkout optimization for higher conversion.
Major announcement: We have one large feature on the horizon that will give merchants even more flexibility in how they use Dodo Payments. We’ll share details in mid-Q4.
Final takeaway
Billing infrastructure is a part of the product experience your customers feel every month. Quarter 3 taught us that correctness and flexibility matter more than rushing features to market. So we focused on prioritizing predictable invoices, transparent reporting, and pricing models that reflect real usage, we helped merchants reduce billing friction and strengthen customer trust.
If you’re a SaaS or AI founder wrestling with metered pricing, recurring billing complexity, or international payouts. We'd love to show you what UBB and Checkout Sessions can do for your team.
