You can't create new customer journeys

An essential part of a thriving subscription business is giving customers options that tailor the experience to them. That might mean creating a new cancellation flow, an upsell journey or targeting a specific customer segment. When you're at a point where you can't manage simple customer journey amendments without long and complex lead times filled with hard coding, it's time to upgrade your system.

You're having problems with pricing, billing and accounting 

Processes can quickly become complicated in subscription businesses as your user base grows and you start selling into different segments. If you're having to manage subscription changes, like upgrades, downgrade, and co-terming, manually, then not only does it become expensive as your need for more staff members escalates but efficiency declines. This will have a negative impact on your bottom line, and it will be detrimental to customers if you bill them incorrectly, thereby increasing customer churn.

You can't manage all your products

As your product catalog grows it becomes overwhelming to maintain. You need products to be easily accessible, understandable and usable for your sales team, but if you have hundreds of product variants with different pricing, discounts, add ons and dependencies, you're going to make mistakes manually. If you can’t grow your offering the way you want, it’s time to upgrade to a system with an elastic product catalog.

You keep having to build custom integrations for new channels

Partnerships and third party sales channels can be a powerful way of expanding your sales strategy. You need to be able to communicate to your partner exactly how to sell your offering and make it easy to do. That's not a native feature in anything other than a dedicated subscription billing tool, which means you will need to build custom integrations and hard code the user journeys for sales reps and partners. As with all other customizations, the more you do, the more complicated and unwieldy it becomes, leading to costly errors and ineffective sales tools.

You can't get accurate data reports

Understanding customer behaviors through accurate reporting is essential for the ongoing development of your business. However, too many customizations and integrations between systems makes it hard to collect a consistent data stream. If you can’t get accurate information to develop your product, service or customer experience—you’ve outgrown your system.