Case study
Billing & Licensing System
Designing billing across cloud, self-hosted, licences, and recovery
at Appsmith ↗Choose your depth
The problem, my contribution, outcomes, and strongest screens.
My role
Product design · Experience strategy · Systems modelling
Product focus
A cross-product billing and licensing system spanning usage, pricing, purchase, access, failure, and recovery.
The Short Version
I led the experience strategy for Appsmith’s billing and licensing across the customer portal and the self-hosted product. It had to connect usage, pricing, plan selection, licence setup, payment health, and recovery, without making a customer relearn the system every time they moved between them.
The Mess
Billing here meant cloud and self-hosted, usage-based pricing, three different plan tiers, trials, licence keys, failed payments, and downgrades, all pulling in different directions. The job was to make those relationships understandable without turning every routine action into a small research project.
My Part in This
- Mapped how plan, licence origin, usage, account role, payment status, and lifecycle stage affect the next available action.
- Turned scattered business rules and edge cases into a shared decision model for product and engineering.
- Designed connected journeys for evaluation, upgrade, installation, licence management, payment recovery, and downgrade.
What Got Better
- Created one shared model for usage, plan, licence, payment, role, and lifecycle states.
- Gave product and engineering explicit behaviour for high-risk billing moments across cloud and self-hosted products.
Impact
What Actually Moved
For the Business
Unified usage, billing, and licensing rules reduced cross-team ambiguity across the customer portal and self-hosted product.
For the Humans
Customers can see what a plan costs, what it unlocks, and what changes before they upgrade, recover a payment, or downgrade.
For the Spreadsheet
Supports trial conversion, upgrades, and payment recovery through clearer next steps at each revenue-critical moment.
Highlights evidence
3 essential screens from the final experience.
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