Subscription Commerce Development

Acquisition is the easy half.

We build and run subscription businesses: a gin club, a sleep club for a babywear brand, personalised supplements on a recurring plan, and credit-based memberships sold through gyms. Several we have supported for the better part of a decade.

Subscription changes what the software is for. A one-off store optimises the first purchase; a subscription business lives or dies on the ninety-first day. That moves the engineering effort somewhere unglamorous — failed payments, dunning, plan changes, pauses, and the slow drift between what a member is charged and what they were promised.

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Capabilities

What we build in subscription commerce

Bespoke subscription engines

Custom subscription apps where off-the-shelf does not fit the model, so the business owns its customer data and its checkout rather than renting both.

Dunning and failed payments

Retry and recovery flows for the failures that quietly erode recurring revenue, treated as a revenue system rather than an error path.

Membership migrations while live

Moving existing members onto a new billing engine mid-term, without interrupting a single active subscription.

Personalisation at renewal

Using what the business learns about a member — from blood chemistry to sleep stage to taste — to make each renewal more relevant than the last.

Retention analytics

Reporting built around cohorts, churn and lifetime value rather than sessions and conversion rate, because those are the numbers that decide the business.

Long-term product partnership

Continuous modernisation instead of periodic rebuilds — in one case keeping a subscription business current for close to a decade with no downtime rebuild.

The Domain

What makes subscription commerce different

The constraints that shape every build in this sector — and the ones an agency that has not worked here tends to discover late.

01
Churn beats conversion
A subscription business with brilliant acquisition and ordinary retention is a leaking bucket with a bigger tap. The software's job is the ninety-first day, not the first.
02
Failed payments are a revenue system
Involuntary churn — expired cards, failed retries — is often the single largest cancellation source, and it is entirely an engineering problem rather than a marketing one.
03
Renting the subscription layer has a cost
Off-the-shelf subscription apps own the customer data and the checkout. That is fine until the business model diverges from the app's assumptions, which it always eventually does.
04
You cannot pause to re-platform
Members are mid-term and charges are scheduled. Any migration has to run underneath live subscriptions, which rules out a clean cutover and makes rehearsal essential.
05
Billing drift is silent
The gap between what a member is charged and what they were sold opens slowly and is invisible until somebody complains. It has to be actively checked for, not waited on.

Related Work

A gin club, a babywear sleep club, personalised supplements and gym memberships — recurring revenue we help run, not just build.

See All Work

eCommerce · Conversion Optimisation

Craft Gin Club

Our pre-rebrand work under the Craft Gin Club brand (now The Curious Drinker) — unified a fragmented tech stack and rebuilt the Members Area. 81% conversion uplift.

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