Challenge

When Linear launched in 2020, the Bay Area company targeted its software development–project management tool to businesses like itself – startups and early-stage companies. Linear had used Stripe Atlas to incorporate and Stripe Payments for payment processing, and initially its needs were simple. It offered a free tier and a "pay what you want" subscription model as low-friction ways to attract the users needed to refine its offering.

As Linear's knowledge of its customers grew, the company tailored its pricing model for the different types of users on its platform, which expanded to include mid-market and high-growth businesses, including many public companies. The company wanted multiple pricing tiers and alternative subscription models, with plenty of flexibility to manage licencing changes as they happened. Throughout, Linear needed a partner that could offer all these options in one place, with billing tools that could scale just as fast as it was growing and a payment solution that was optimised for conversion and global reach.

Growth also led to more complex financial operations for Linear. Undergoing a tax audit raised the stakes: The company recognised the need to formalise its financial processes and build a more robust data infrastructure to ensure accurate financial reporting. But Linear had been relying on a third-party ETL tool to sync its Stripe data to its data warehouse, which introduced data gaps and reliability issues that made it difficult to trust the numbers powering key business decisions. Linear needed full confidence in its financial data, and knew its current setup needed to change.

Linear required a single partner that could keep pace with all of it – flexible billing and tax compliance tools, a payment solution optimised for conversion and global reach, and robust data infrastructure capable of supporting the financial rigour the business now required.

"We don't want to manage multiple different systems and tools as we focus on building our customer base," said Cristina Cordova, Linear's chief operating officer. "So, it's critically important to have the right billing and payments systems."

Solution

To provide its customers with a variety of pricing plans while optimising for conversion, Linear chose Stripe Billing, an automated solution for managing recurring revenue, paired with Stripe's Optimized Checkout Suite. The suite includes Stripe Checkout, which offers a prebuilt payment form that is optimised for conversion and built for more than 30 languages and more than 135 currencies; a variety of popular payment methods; and Link, Stripe's accelerated checkout option that saves and autofills customers' payment and shipping details for a faster payment experience.

Linear customised Checkout's colours, fonts and brand settings to match its existing branding – an important feature for a company that prioritises "good taste" in its product design. Checkout also allowed Linear to easily upsell customers from monthly subscriptions to annual subscriptions. A simple toggle switch, set by default to the lower monthly rate for an annual subscription, incentivises users to choose that option, while Stripe handles the different prices on the backend.

Stripe Billing APIs made it easy to integrate with Linear's platform and delivered the required flexibility to adapt to changes in Linear's subscription offerings over the past five years. The company now has three billing tiers, plus custom pricing for enterprises. The subscription schedules integrated into Billing provide a way to automate changes to subscriptions over time, including upgrading, downgrading or otherwise changing subscriptions. Linear uses subscription schedules to consolidate licensing changes as a way to simplify invoicing and improve the customer experience.

"The documentation is very good," said Tom Moor, Linear's US engineering lead. "From an engineering point of view, we can for the most part just work through that and do what needs to be done through the API."

For tax compliance, Linear rolled out Stripe Tax. Engineers completed the technical implementation in under two weeks. Linear relies on Stripe to calculate and collect the right amount of tax on every transaction as the business scales to new regions. This replaced what had been a reactive, manual process with an automated system that scales alongside the business.

To address its data reliability challenges, Linear adopted Stripe Data Pipeline. Data Pipeline now sends Linear's Stripe data directly to Snowflake, where it's combined with other business sources. This centralised data powers company-wide metric dashboards that give teams across the organisation consistent visibility into business performance and enable deeper cross-data analysis. The Linear team also built a set of custom dashboards used to track initiatives like legacy customer migrations to new pricing plans and their associated revenue impact.

"With Stripe Data Pipeline, making sure that all of that data can come to a single source of truth within our internal dashboards starts to become more and more important to understand how the business is operating in these separate regions, " said Cordova.

Results

2 days to implement Checkout and Billing

The flexibility of Stripe technology and strong documentation made it easy for Linear's engineers to complete the initial integration and to pursue changes to its subscription and pricing options over time. For example, Linear has evolved from only offering self-serve payments to creating bespoke pricing arrangements for Fortune 100 companies.

A smooth process for receiving payments

Likewise, the Optimized Checkout Suite has been an unqualified win: Linear can support multiple payment methods – and add new ones at any time – without requiring any additional engineering time. Linear has enabled several payment methods, including Apple Pay, US bank transfers and ACH direct debit, with bank transfers accounting for 18% of payment volume – representing Linear's most popular payment method for larger payments. "In the last couple of years, the Optimized Checkout Suite is the biggest thing I can think of that was able to reduce engineering time and simultaneously improve the experience," said Moor.

Subscription scheduling consolidates licence changes every 24 hours

The ability to consolidate subscription changes with subscription schedules improved the customer experience, particularly for enterprise customers. If a business adds or removes users in a day, Linear doesn't have to manually manage them individually. Instead, Stripe schedules all license changes to trigger billing updates every 24 hours.

"This feature allows us to simplify customer invoices," said Moor. "Otherwise, they get really unwieldy."

Reliable financial data and organisation-wide visibility

Replacing its ETL tool with Stripe Data Pipeline had an immediate impact on how Linear operates. Teams across the organisation now work from the same accurate, centralised view of business performance – giving both financial reporting and day-to-day decision-making a more dependable foundation. The engineering benefit has been equally significant: Engineers no longer need to spend time fixing data gaps, freeing them to stay focused on building the product.

Tax compliance that scales with the business

With Stripe Tax, Linear went from absorbing tax costs to automated, region-by-region compliance. The rollout to customers was straightforward: one email notification informing them that tax may apply going forward.

"We went from constantly wondering, 'Are we compliant?' to just getting notified when there's something new to set up," said Cordova. "It works really smoothly with our finance team."

A solid foundation for future growth

As Linear continues to grow, the company relies on Stripe to seamlessly run billing and payments, leaving its team free to focus on its core products. "There is a set-it-and-forget-it component to Stripe's pureplay integration, which to me is a value add," said Cordova. "We don't change the core integration much over time, and new features are generally backwards compatible, all of which makes our lives easier."