How to migrate subscriptions from Chargebee to Stripe
Hello again, I’m the principal behind Stripe Transfer — a 7 year old white glove service for people migrating their Stripe subscriptions, products, and coupons as a result of a company acquisition or moving from one country to another. As of this writing we’ve helped successfully transfer over $23,000,000 in ARR over nearly 100,000 subscriptions and in 16 different countries around the world. And we love doing it.
Before we begin, I want to make it clear that no two Chargebee or Stripe setups are the same. We’ve seen a lot of setups in these two platforms over the last 7 years of helping our customers through migrations large and small. There simply is no one answer of how to do this.
However, there are some key things to consider and some steps we recommend taking to ensure your migration goes smoothly. As always, if you need any help get in touch with us to help you through it.
Step 1: Make a plan
I cannot overemphasize the importance of creating a written plan for these types of transfers. Many of our customers are running companies that are several years old and there are many things that even the founders may have forgotten about. By writing down each step in the process and going over it with our clients in detail, we’re able to avoid huge issues.
What are some common things we’ve seen companies forget about when doing a migration from Stripe to Stripe or from Chargebee to Stripe?
- Forgotten integrations — Webhooks, apps, third-party APIs, CI pipelines, automation tools, chatbots, AIs, etc. For any business these types of integrations provide an enormous value in customer support, transactional communications, insight, marketing analytics, automation, and more. When a migrations happens there are thousands, and often tens of thousands, of events that are triggered. Ensuring that you know about each integration and how to disable and reenable them quickly is extremely important.
- Avoiding interruptions in payments — We pride ourselves on creating a plan and process for our customers that involves nearly zero (or, sometimes actually zero) downtime and little or no interruptions to cashflow. We say it right on our website: “100% success rate”. However, fraud protections and controls are getting tighter and tighter. Moving subscriptions from one region of the world to another can throw a lot of warnings or issues. Mitigating these as best as possible through proper planning and customer communication can save you from any surprises.
- Simplifying your product offering — Many content subscriptions businesses often sell their goods in as many different ways as possible; giving their customers choice and keeping up with competition. A/B testing, annual plans, monthly plans, trials, discounts, one-time offers, and many more things can make your product offering a convoluted and messy business. Making a plan that can, and often does, include a simplification of your product line can significantly reduce your risk of error.
Of course, there are many others. And we’ve documented them internally so that as we’ve continued to work with our customers month after month, year after year, we’ve increased our institutional knowledge around avoiding common mistakes.
Step 2: Testing the plan
Some timelines and environments allow for very little testing. But it must be done. No matter how rushed the situation may feel, making mistakes at this stage will be far more costly than a few extra days allowed for proper planning and testing of that plan. If a transfer goes sideways it is very possible the business would never recover. That is why we make this part of our process vital and we will not execute a plan prior to testing.
What are some ways that you can test your migration plan? Stripe and Chargebee both offer testing or sandbox accounts that you can test your automations, product set ups, and notifications. Utilizing these environments will help eliminate some of the issues you will face during the live transfer — but they cannot solve or account for every possible situation you’ll see. This is in part because Stripe/Chargebee don’t typically share data between their two environments. Because of this it may take a little bit of time to set up a proper test.
Another way to test your plan is to simply walk through it step by step prior to the live transfer. Each party taking their role and documenting how long it takes them to carry it out, what tools, webpages, or credentials they will need along the way. Very often during this stage of the process, additional tasks around found and need to be added to the original plan.
The bulk of the time that we spend as a team working with our customers is during the planning and testing phases.
Step 3: Executing the plan
It is very seldom that a planned migration from Chargebee to Stripe — or also from Stripe to Stripe — takes more than 1 business day. There have been exceptions and that was usually do to some legal hurdle, waiting on a third-party, or that the plan consisted of more than a single day’s work. But on average, the actual transfer takes just a few hours.
The day the plan is executed it is a good idea if you can have all possible hands at the ready in case something should come up. While our customer’s intervention is seldom needed, there are times when we have a question about a specific subscription or product that we simply do not have the answer for. Having someone from our customer’s team that understands their products, customers, and setups can help immensely.
Realtime asynchronous communication is how we typically collaborate on the day of the transfer. WhatsApp, Apple’s Messages app, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Slack, Teams, etc. — we don’t care what our customers prefer. We will work with their team wherever they prefer to make sure we have direct communication with their team.
Being flexible is key to having a migration go smoothly. Even if you’ve planned the migration to go a specific way, you may find out you need to make an adjustment right in the middle of the process.
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I hope this general overview of some of the steps in our typical plan for migration subscriptions from Chargebee to Stripe has been helpful. We’ve never had a migration go sideways. We have, however, refused to do transfers for customers for a variety of reasons. But we will get to that perhaps in a different post some day.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Why didn’t you get into specifics or share code? The code for this type of transfer is readily available in other locations. I’ve shared the source code for many of our transfers in the past. While looking at code is helpful to some developers — most of the time it can lead to huge issues for customers. Copying and pasting the code for one project and using it on another will almost always lead to enormous headaches and possible loss of revenue. We do not do that. Each of our automations are bespoke processes that are tailored to each of our customer’s needs.
How much does it cost to migrate subscriptions from Chargebee to Stripe? No two migrations are the same so it isn’t possible for me to provide this number. But wait, we offer free quotes! So go to our website and email us. We can usually give you an exact quote in just a few minutes over Zoom.
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Thanks for reading,
