How Lokki uses Hyperline to scale billing for thousands of customers

A subscription model set from day one

Lokki is a mission-driven company that aims to democratize renting. Its B2B SaaS helps professionals start or accelerate their rental businesses with a productivity tool that meets their needs, and its marketplace tool enables the booking of equipment through B2B partner networks. More than 1,500 rental clients use the solution, from independent rental companies to large chains like Sport2000 and Leclerc, across France, Switzerland, Belgium, and Portugal.

For rental shops, Lokki implemented a subscription model from day one: a monthly or yearly subscription based on the number of available rental items, typically completed by a setup fee to ensure a smooth collaboration start. Raphaël, co-founder and CEO, regularly adjusted this pricing to align with product evolution and customer needs.

“One of our early investors advised us to challenge our pricing model regularly, every 6 months or at least once a year. We’ve kept this habit and are currently testing usage-based pricing!”

Three tools and a billing monster

To run recurring billing at that scale, Lokki quickly adopted GoCardless as their payment provider, without much deliberation: entrepreneur friends used it, and it had a subscriptions module. The setup looked simple at first but eventually proved unsuitable. Custom pricing at scale, numerous payment errors, difficulties tracking unpaid invoices, and reporting errors pushed Lokki to add Octobat and Henrri to fill the gaps left by GoCardless. Billing now ran across three tools.

“The company was still young, and I was already creating a billing monster… We were leaving money on the table each month, and it couldn’t continue.”

Rebuilding the finance stack

Faced with this situation, Raphaël undertook significant internal process improvements, particularly between the Sales and Finance teams: the ambition was to become a product-driven company rather than a sales-driven one. He sought advice from other startup founders who had gone through similar simplification and scaling phases, and brought in a part-time CFO for guidance.

The search was for a billing solution that could centralize processes and become the single source of truth. Hyperline met the needs: easy iteration on the pricing model, an intuitive platform for the Sales, Customer Success, and Finance teams, and key features their existing stack lacked, such as price overrides at scale for negotiated deals.

“We chose Hyperline for the power of the tool and the time it saved our teams, but also for the support and human touch from the Hyperline team: they quickly understood our pain points and needs, it was very reassuring.”

Migrating 1,500 clients without friction

At the end of 2023, Lokki decided to migrate their 1,500+ clients to Hyperline. The migration was managed in close collaboration with the Hyperline team, and it included onboarding sessions for the Sales and Customer Success teams, the future daily users of the platform.

“These sessions were very important for us. They helped embed this process change, empower the teams, and reassure them about Hyperline’s responsiveness.”

More than 6 months in, Raphaël and the Lokki teams have reached their goals: billing is centralized in a single tool, the transition was quick and painless, and adoption came with support ready to answer questions from the teams. Asked for three words to describe Hyperline, Raphaël picks simplicity, adaptability, and responsiveness.

“With Hyperline, we found a tool that centralizes our entire process, supports our company’s growth, and, most importantly, is loved by our teams for daily use.”