Tapmad Wallet/Billing Migration: 50% to 1%

Diagnosed unit economics as a payments problem, not a pricing problem. Rebuilt rail mix, retries and dunning around wallet/DCB economics, pulled payment cost from ~50% to ~1% of revenue while scaling to 5M+ paid subscribers.

Tapmad's subscription business was being eaten alive by payment cost, operator and aggregator margins consumed up to half of revenue, capping growth and ARPU.

• Re-architected billing to prefer wallet, DCB and direct bank rails
• Smart retry and dunning flows tuned per rail and per cohort
• Pricing and packaging changes aligned to rail economics
• Reconciliation against operator settlements to recover leakage

• Rail preference engine per subscriber state and prior failure history
• Per-rail retry curves instead of a single global retry policy

Drove the payments product strategy, vendor renegotiation and the cross-functional migration with growth, finance and engineering.

• Reduced payment cost from ~50% to ~1% of revenue
• Scaled to 5M+ paid subscribers
• Increased ARPU by 70%

• Payment cost is a product variable, not a procurement one.
• Retries and dunning are growth levers when rail economics are understood.

The transferable core: treating payment cost as a product variable, rebuilding rail mix, retries and dunning around wallet and DCB economics. Every subscription, marketplace and creator platform hits this wall eventually, inside every network, PSP and cross-border platform; only the logo changes.