Billing Platform Overhaul

Executive Summary

About Postscript

Postscript is a SMS marketing channel for businesses on Shopify enabling merchants to grow their audience and create personalized messaging at scale. From SMBs to large customers like Mr. Beast, the billing experience wasn't just a back-end necessity but a critical touchpoint shaping customer trust and operational efficiency.

What motivated the change?

In an effort to increase transparency and optimize growth, Postscript moved from a credits based model to a usage based model. Moving from these two models presented a multifaceted challenge: redefining the technical architecture, ensuring account executives (AE's) clearly understood the changes to effectively communicate them to both new and existing customers, and reshaping the merchant experience. This shift required a holistic approach to align technology, the business, and user experience.

How might we design a billing experience that offers transparency and visibility into a merchants usage, built on a framework that can scale from the small shops to our enterprise customers?

My Role

I was the lead designer who partnered directly with product and engineering, creating foundational principles, defining product scope & timelines, and design a new billing platform experience.

Responsibilities

Product Design: Design Strategy, Prototyping, Usability Testing
UX Research: User Interview, data analysis, synthesis
Product Management: Epic & Story creation, scope, roadmap

My contribution

Hosted ideation workshops, led user research, conducted audits, analyzed usage data, synthesized findings, and created artifacts.
Defined the design strategy and user experience for three core moments: current usage, billing payments, and plans. This was included in our overall product roadmap.
Designed a modular framework for the billing experience that considered SMBs and Enterprise users. I incorporated new styles, components, and patterns into our design system.

Outcome

After five months, the new platform was implemented & adopted across the entire company. The platform achieved 20% of ARR passing through the new system in it's first month and customers shared their satisfaction with the implementation.

Img 1:

Usage Billing Screen Samples

The Two Model Problem

Understanding Billing Models

The billing models play a crucial role in the customer experience, internal processes, and Postscript's revenue structure. Each model comes with unique trade-offs that directly impact merchant's trust, efficiency, and scalability.

Credits-Based Billing Model

In a credits-based system, users purchase credits in order to use send messages through Postscript (ref Img 2). This approach offers simplicity in budgeting, as customers know their spending upfront. However, if the credits aren't used by the end of the month, merchants will lose them resulting in the sentiment that money was left on the table.

As a result, this model can lead to confusion and misalignment, especially as usage scales or needs become more nuanced. For internal teams, it can introduce challenges in reconciling usage and accurately projecting revenue.

Img 2:

Credit Billing Model Diagram

Usage-Based Model

The usage-based model directly ties cost to actual SMS sent (ref Img 3), providing a clearer relationship between SMS and pricing. This system is inherently more transparent and adaptable, giving merchants visibility into their spending relative to their usage.

However, implementing this model introduced challenges that required a strong understanding of the systems involved, potential pain points, and communication strategies.

Img 3:

Usage Billing Model Diagram

Understanding our users

Diving into research

To design a billing system that would work for merchants and be understood by our AE's, I conducted a series of user interviews in order to learn about how the current billing system was used, needs, pain points, aspirations, and behaviors. Understanding each group played a critical role in the success of the new model and taking consideration of their expectations and experiences varied significantly.

Img 4:

V0 of the billing experience

Merchants

Merchants are the primary users and the heart of Postscript. For them, the billing experience needed to be transparent and predictable in order understand the ROI from the product. Through interviews and usability tests, I explored questions like:

How do merchants manage their monthly credits and billing?
What aspects of the current billing experience were most confusing or frustrating?
What is the sentiment of applying credits towards their campaigns?

These conversations helped me understand that users wanted a more straightforward approach to the billing experience. Merchants want to spend less time meticulously managing the number of credits they have remaining and more time on launching their marketing campaigns.

Merchants also shared that the credits model was rigid and did not scale to fit their needs. For example, a merchant will buy more credits during the holiday's due to peak sales opportunity but when the holiday's end, consumer spending decreases. Merchant's marketing spend is noticeably smaller compared to the holidays, making the remaining credits look like money left on the table.

Account Executives (AEs)

Although AE's weren't necessarily the primary users of Postscript, they are product experts of the platform and are responsible for maintaining relationships with our premium and enterprise customers. For them, clarity and confidence in explaining the new billing model was paramount. I conducted shadowing sessions and workshops to get a better sense of the the AE's workflows, asking:

What questions or concerns related to the credits model most frequently come up?
How do AE's manage customized plans?
How much time do they spend with clients on billing vs product features?

The results of these sessions and workshops revealed how many components are involved in both models. It crucial to map the experience across all of our customers, from SMBs to Enterprises, and creating a frame work that is balanced and scales.

Visualizing user journeys

Img 5:

Usage Billing Overview - Userflow

Challenges

Balancing clarity, ROI, and Usability

After synthesizing the insights from the user research, I mapped out the challenges and collaborated with product and engineering to create a multi-step approach that included comprehensive audits, generating artifacts, and a design strategy.

Auditing and Defining Key Questions

I conducted a review of the existing credits model and presented questions to product and engineering:

How will the design communicate to users actually increases their ROI from Postscript?
What are the key pieces of information that merchants want to see throughout the billing cycle?
How do we design an experience that works for both SMBs and Enterprise customers?

This collaborative questioning led to in-depth discussions aligning our team on priorities and ensuring each team member understood areas of impact. Product management focused on communicating the value of the new model, engineering built end-points for the back-end system, and design created artifacts for the overall experience.

Getting the timing right

The billing process for Postscript is influenced by Twilio, the service sending the messages, and the timing for SMS usage charges and aligning that SMB and Enterprise billing cadences.

I mapped out the SMS billing flow starting with the merchant, Postscript, and Twilio. This allowed me to identify timing conflicts for example if a merchant sends large batches at the end of month. I pinpointed edge cases and made sure there were safeguards to prevent discrepancies in what merchants expected vs what they were billed.

I worked closely with engineering to create logic that addressed timing-related edge cases. I presented scalable frameworks to product that could be adapted to both SMBs and Enterprise customers.

SMS Rates and Chargebacks

With varying SMS rates across domestic and international carriers and potential messaging failures and chargebacks, it was critical to design a framework that presented real-time messaging cost and the number of messages sent, differentiated between successful, failed, and chargeback messages. I also proposed a display for dynamic messaging rates that updated based on changing carrier rates, ensuring merchants had the most up-to-date information.

This was a collaborative effort with product and legal teams. Product helped with information hierarchy while the legal team provided guidance on disclaimers and transparent language for international rates.

Img 6:

Iterations of Billing IA

Solution

Designing the experience

The initial version zero was built as a means to validate the model, but the user experience was yet to be considered.

Scenario-Based Components

Even though SMBs and Enterprises were going to be charged based on their usage, their billing cadence differed. When I was designing the frameworks, I had to keep the overall structure the same and create scenario-based content components that engineering could swap based on the user type. This took many rounds of content iteration to ensure that language met the acceptance criteria my partners and I had defined.

Img 6:

Billing Cadence Diagram

Modular Design

As the content was being refined, I worked on designing a variety of content layouts based on what merchants prioritized. This was applied to their overall summary and their usage.

Img 7:

Scenario components applied to primary content cards

Reflections

What did I take away from this project?

Personal insights

This was a challenging and gratifying project to work on. I grew in appreciation for users managing budgets and how much they value clarity and predictability. The billing experience highlighted how essential it is for merchants to understand not only paying for but also why they are paying for it. This helped me shape my approach towards a scenario-based, modular layout, reinforcing that an experience that favors clarity can help grow trust in a product like Postscript.

Impact on future work

This project sharpened my focus on building solutions that are user-centered, incorporate cross-functional collaboration, and strategically aligned with business goals, an approach that I bring to all of my projects.

User-centered & Design Thinking:
Working to simplify and clarify a complex billing model reinforced the value of always starting with the user’s perspective. I realized the importance of translating user needs into design questions that drive the entire process. In future projects, I prioritize empathizing with users and incorporating iterative feedback to refine designs that resonate with them.
Cross-Functional Collaboration:
Collaborating closely with engineering, product, and legal teams taught me the importance of partnership across departments to balance user needs with technical realities and compliance. Moving forward, I make collaboration a core part of my workflow to ensure that design solutions are not only user-friendly but also feasible and aligned with broader business requirements.
Aligning with Business Goals:
This experience underscored the importance of integrating design with strategic business outcomes. By aligning design initiatives with product roadmaps and revenue goals, I was able to create solutions that served both the users and the company’s growth. Now, I approach each project with an eye on how design can support key business objectives and help prioritize features that deliver real value.