Paddle — 2024

Subscription Management
Redesign

Rebuilding a core billing surface for clarity, scale and merchant confidence.

2024 Product Design Lead Redesign Systems
Paddle Subscription Management Interface

Core

Billing experience redesigned

Led the design of the new billing platform experience on modernised architecture, enabling Paddle to deliver critical new features and expand customer value.

By 2025

Positioned Paddle to compete

In the global subscription billing and Merchant of Record market, driving new customer acquisition while improving retention of existing accounts

48%

Year-on-year revenue growth

The new billing platform helped Paddle achieve record revenue growth, supporting Paddle’s progression to Unicorn status (c. 2025/26).

The Problem

"Paddle’s legacy billing platform, built on a monolithic architecture, no longer met modern needs. It limited scalability, slowed feature development, and hindered new customer acquisition. Meanwhile, existing customers were demanding complex capabilities that were difficult and time-consuming to deliver within the old system."

Rebuilding the platform required redefining how teams worked, with design and back-end engineering collaborating in parallel through tighter feedback loops, new prioritisation models, and faster decision-making. A small, high-impact team owned this business-critical transformation, maintaining strict scope control and focusing only on what delivered real value. All of this was delivered against an ambitious, fixed six-month deadline to launch a fully rebuilt billing platform while balancing architectural complexity with speed to market

Build while redefining ways of working High impact, small team Fixed 6-month MVP deadline

My Role

  • End-to-end UX and UI ownership
  • Prototyping UX flows and usability testing
  • Design system contributions
  • Close collaboration with engineering

I co-owned this redesign end-to-end, from the initial audit through to final handoff. Working closely with the PMs and engineering teams, I led an on-site full day workshop with key stakeholders, worked on early concepts and flows, usability research, mapped the full interaction landscape, and worked closely with front and back-end engineers to push the new billing platform live.

Process

MVP Outlined

The technical architecture had already been agreed so it meant we had layer the experience on top and agree changes as we go.

Ideation + Workshop

I spent a day onsite with product, design, and engineering leads to challenge assumptions, refine concepts, and stress-test the experience—building on the initial ideas and flows developed in design.

Design & Test

Iterated through multiple rounds of prototypes tested with real Paddle customers and refined.

Ship & Iterate

Collaborated closely with engineering throughout the delivery phase, where time was short and scope cut to push live on time.

The initial direction had been set before the team came on board, so we had to hit the ground running to meet an ambitious timeline. Insights from the legacy platform gave us a clear, layered understanding of where the experience was breaking down and why.

  • Ran cross-functional workshops with engineering and PMs to align on scope and constraints
  • Internal design team concepting and peer reviews, exploring different design styles and flows
  • Built master prototype to run usability testing
  • Tested concepts with customer profiles to validate flows and clarity before build
Process exploration 1

I led a full day design workshop with the product dept.

Process exploration 2
Process exploration 3
Process exploration 2
Process exploration 3

Design workshop samples.

Key Findings from early workshops and internal planning

MVP requirements

The redesign covered core flows, new subscription management patterns, and updated logic such as country-specific pricing overrides.

What we didn't include

The initial plan was to launch with a standard subscription pricing model and introduce tiered, volume and graduated later.

Price overrides

A new country price override model would be needed to accommodate modern subscription models and this would require new user experience that differs from Paddle Classic.

Early concept exploration and wireframing translating workshop feedback and design thinking into initial directions before committing to a final approach.

Ideation — concept exploration 1

Samples from early product and pricing designs.

Ideation — concept exploration 2

Samples from early subscription management designs.

Ideation — concept exploration 3
Ideation — concept exploration 4

Samples from early pro-ratio card designs and pause/resume subscription drawers.

Selected screens

Subscription overview and management
Subscription overview and management — continued

Subscription overview & management.

View and manage active customer subscriptions

Edit, pause or cancel subscriptions in context

Surface key subscription metrics at a glance

Product creation and pricing
Product creation and pricing continued

Product creation & pricing.

Create and edit subscription product pricing flow

Country specific pricing (price overrides) flow

Price name and description testing across the checkout, invoicing and dashboard

Discount creation and management

Discount creation and management flow.

Create, edit and manage discount flows within the new billing platform

End to end design work on discount appearance from dashboards to invoices

Subscription Billing emails and invoices

Billing emails and invoices & history.

New and updated end customer emails and billing invoice experience to complete subscription lifecycle

Designed email UX flows for all B2C emails including complex proration and subscription updates

Undertook usability sessions frequently with end users to check they can understand each type of billing invoice

A cleaner, more confident subscription management experience — reducing merchant confusion and support overhead at scale.

  • New billing platform delievered on time, allowing all new customers access
  • Enhanced customer experience and new modern approach to managing their subscriptions
  • The new platform allows Paddle sales teams to compete against competitors like Stripe and increase our revenues by helping customers scale

Reflection

I'd push for a dedicated merchant research round earlier. Much of what we learned came through support ticket analysis rather than direct conversation — valuable, but second-hand. Speaking directly to merchants would have surfaced the emotional dimension of billing anxiety sooner.

The redesign meaningfully reduced confusion and support volume. The real win was establishing reusable design patterns that the wider team could build on — good design at this level compounds over time.