Why customized subscription architecture will eventually stop working

When subscriptions first started to gain traction as a business model, lots of companies segued into the space, while others emerged directly into it. With a world of user needs yet to be explored in this emerging market, businesses adapted their existing systems using intricate custom built solutions. While the subscriptions remained simple or a secondary part of their business, this was sufficient.

Today, systems need to be purpose designed for intricate subscription service offerings and the complexities of retaining customers over an extended period of time. The ever increasing integration between subscription technologies and business means that more and more tools have been introduced to meet complex needs of different users. 

Building each new requirement and innovation from scratch not only proves costly and time consuming to develop, but to maintain as well. That can easily result either in disproportionate expenditure or insufficient connectivity and functionality. For example, commerce platforms are added to the tech stack for the customer journey, but subscription logic needs to be built from scratch; or analytics tools are added for reporting, but data is scattered on different platforms and it collects disconnected events.

Customization that once seemed like the height of sophistication eventually becomes a patchwork of solutions that gradually limit operational scalability. As a result, the future of subscription architecture is a living, breathing, purpose-created ecosystem that’s designed to evolve.

What new types of system mean for subscription businesses

Where once the goal was simply to execute recurring billing capabilities, the DNA of the contemporary subscription businesses is much more involved. The new goals of business systems hinge on flexibility, speed, user experience and actionable insights driven by real-time data. These are not capabilities that legacy systems can be adapted to fulfill via individual components because they are woven into the fabric of the platform with a rule-based, event-driven and API-first approach that lays the foundations on which business leaders can launch ideas and innovations without limits.

Thanks to a low-code or no-code configuration-based approach, subscription architecture of the future will allow businesses to adapt strategies quickly without the help of engineers and customization. As a result, they are easily extensible, staying a step ahead of business and customers.

• Discover the technology foundation of keylight

Focusing on the user experience is at the heart of any modern business, but successful subscription models are defined by incorporating that mindset into the architecture of the technology itself. With the subscription architecture of the future, all user interactions are as conversational as possible, with technologies providing clear reasoning for automated decisions.

• Find out more about our user-centric approach

Capturing data and capturing actionable data are two entirely different things. Subscription businesses are in a unique position to track and understand user behavior at all stages of their journey, as long as they have the right technology, but having a system that contextualizes data to accurately inform and direct decision making rather than hypothesizing about it is an elusive capability. With the subscription architecture of the future we can capture user events, journeys and paths that contain dynamic time information, looking beyond transactional data like KPIs, purchases and invoices. The ability to operate in this future context is the pivotal feature of keylight's transformative Prospective Business Engine.

• Discover keylight's Prospective Business Engine