How Primo uses Hyperline to manage a large product catalog
Primo's hybrid pricing outgrew Stripe Billing. Since April 2023, Hyperline runs their catalog, credits, and monthly invoicing on a single platform.
Primo is the first all-in-one platform designed for modern companies, helping small and medium-sized businesses manage their applications, devices, people, and security within a scalable platform.
Challenge
Existing billing solutions were not a good fit for Primo's hybrid pricing model, making it painful to manage a large product catalog and iterate on pricing.
Solution
Hyperline was the only solution flexible enough to easily manage and charge thousands of products, with near-instant support and features shipped on demand.
Pricing model
Primo offers a free plan, Deploy, with one-off device purchases and resale credits, plus a monthly per-device fee for Remote Management and add-ons.
Results
With Hyperline, the Primo team can effortlessly manage their product catalog, iterate on pricing models, and seamlessly charge customers at the end of each month.
A hybrid pricing model from day one
Primo is an all-in-one platform that helps small and medium-sized businesses manage their applications, devices, people, and security. Its customers rarely have an in-house IT team: companies typically hire their first IT manager at 200 or 300 employees, and until then, welcoming a new team member can involve around 35 tasks.
That market shapes the pricing. Customers start for free with Deploy, where they buy devices as one-off purchases and track them for their entire lifecycle, up to a resale handled with credits. Remote Management, a premium feature, is charged on a per device basis, and marketplace add-ons can be charged per device or per employee.
Martin, Founder and CEO of Primo, knew a billing solution was needed from day one when he launched the company in 2022.
“Stripe Billing was the first thing that came to mind, and I didn’t even think of challenging this choice initially.”
The limits of Stripe Billing
The team expected an easy setup. For their hybrid use case, which mixes recurring payments, one-time payments, and a free plan, Stripe Billing quickly became a complex system instead.
“When our pricing was simple, the no-code version was fine. But when we decided to make our pricing model more complex by adding usage-based fees, that’s when the problems started.”
Integrating Stripe Billing elements into the app, such as the Checkout Portal, took the tech team 2 to 3 weeks per integration, which was not sustainable. Support disappointed too, with delayed responses even in high-pressure situations.
“We needed a billing solution with top-notch customer service. I can’t wait for a response for 5 days or more to resolve critical issues.”
Costs added to the frustration: features like Stripe Tax (0.5%) sometimes weighed heavily on the final bill without being clearly indicated from the start. And Stripe Billing felt too focused on card payments, while Primo wanted to prioritize other methods like SEPA direct debit. The team decided to find a billing solution better suited to their hybrid use case.
A beta that felt like a finished product
Since April 2023, Primo has relied on Hyperline as their all-in-one billing platform. Getting started was simple, and even enjoyable: the no-code interface lets the team handle billing, manage subscriptions, send invoices, and adjust pricing on their own, and the transition to fully automated billing was smooth.
The beta itself surprised Martin.
“When we joined the Hyperline beta testing program at the beginning of this journey, we expected a young and possibly unstable product; that’s just part of the process. However, that was not the case at all. We’ve had very few issues since we started using Hyperline, which is remarkable and strengthens our trust in the product and the team behind it.”
Billing that fits the product
Six months in, what Martin appreciates most is the customer experience: responses from the Hyperline tech team are almost instant, and specific needs turn into product features at speed.
“We were impressed by the tech teams’ responsiveness. Sometimes, we needed a particular feature, and the next day, it was available on Hyperline.”
Some of those features map directly to Primo’s model. Wallets let Primo implement credits for reselling end-of-life devices. The Customer Portal, and the ability to extract its components for direct integration into Primo, brought the payment experience inside the product itself.
For Martin, the transition to Hyperline delivered a simpler, more efficient, and tailored billing experience: a billing journey with far greater peace of mind than other solutions on the market allowed.
